2013 Keynote: Forms and Functions of Stress and Accent in Spoken Language: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

In my talk I will present a survey of work that I did (together with students and co-workers) since the early 1970s on the topic of (word) stress and (sentence) accent on a variety of lan- guages (Germanic and non-Germanic). Part of the presentation will be based on published papers, for another part I will rely on unpublished materials (mainly student papers and theses). A recurrent theme will be how word stress is marked by the speaker, and what acoustic cues contribute (in what order of importance) to the perception of word stress on a particular syllable by the listener. I will consider the issue whether the stress cues have a universally fixed order of importance, or vary from one language to the next, and in the latter case to what extent the order of importance can be predicted from functional principles. I will also address the issue how stress contributes to the process of word recognition in Dutch and English (stress differs between words), as opposed to languages with either fixed stress (uniform stress location for all the words in the lexicon), or with no preference for stress on one syllable or the other (Indonesian).