Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to Tonal Accent

This volume explores tonal accent across a variety of the world''s languages from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Tonal accent lies at the heart of current debates on the typology of prosodic representations, one of the most controversial fields in contemporary phonological theory; the phenomenon is relevant to both word prominence and tone, but its status remains somewhat unclear. The chapters in this volume present and evaluate the current state of research in the field and demonstrate that the study of tonal accent can shed light on multiple important questions in phonology. They also outline directions for future research, based on novel and underused empirical data and on the principle of contextualizing different, language-specific research traditions within broader theoretical debates.