SERBO-CROATIAN PITCH ACCENT: THE INTERACTION OF TONE, STRESS, AND INTONATION

This article develops an autosegmental account of tone and stress in Serbo-Croatian. The traditional four accents of Serbo-Croatian are decomposed into two independent subcomponents within the accentual system: tone and stress. While tone participates in lexical contrasts, the location of stress is predictable from that of tone, and in this respect Serbo-Croatian represents a previously unattested type of pitch-accent language. The analysis extends naturally to a range of intonation data, some of which are beyond the scope of earlier accounts.* Serbo-Croatian is one of many languages whose accentual system falls under the somewhat elusive heading of pitch accent. In this paper we address the question of what exactly this abstract entity consists of, concluding that pitch accent can be broken down into several component parts. We show that tone and stress are the two operative phonological entities sufficient to characterize prosody in Serbo-Croatian, rendering the term 'accent' superfluous. Using the tools of autosegmental phonology and underspecification theory, we account for the distribution of Serbo-Croatian 'accents' solely in terms of tone: stress, by being totally predictable from tone, makes no contribution to lexical contrasts. We offer a simple and comprehensive account of the data that have been described in the literature. Moreover, our approach extends naturally to cover a range of intonation data which have not been discussed in the literature before