What is a Starred Tone? Evidence from Greek

The theoretical construct “starred tone” is assumed without comment in virtually all autosegmental analyses of intonation. The notation on which this idea is based—the asterisk or star to indicate accent—appears to have been introduced by Goldsmith in his early discussions of English intonation (1976, 1981). Goldsmith suggested that one syllable in the syllabic tier and one tone in the melodic tier are assigned an accent, “written with an asterisk” (1981:288). The fact that both the tone—e.g. the H tone of the basic declarative contour of American English, HL or MHL, shown in (1)—and the syllable are marked with a star ensures their autosegmental association and, the theory predicts, their phonetic co-occurrence. In addition, the accentual association makes the starred syllable “prominent or ‘distinguished’” (1976:117). (1)

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