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Pitch accent is a feature of certain languages whereby variations in pitch (linguistic tones) can be used to differentiate words, but where the potentially distinctive tones are restricted to only one or two syllables within a word – as opposed to fully tonal languages like Standard Chinese, where each syllable can have an independent tone. In a pitch accent language, the syllable with phonemic tone is typically one that is acoustically prominent (stressed). Also many words may not be marked for tone at all. Languages that have been described as pitch accent languages include certain Scandinavian and South Slavic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Japanese, Korean, Hiaki〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Prominence in Yaqui Words )〕 and Shanghainese.〔Matthew Y. Chen, ''Tone Sandhi: Patterns across Chinese Dialects'', CUP, 2000, p. 223.〕 It has been claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined,〔Larry Hyman, "Word-Prosodic Typology", ''Phonology'' (2006), 23: 225-257 Cambridge University Press〕 and indeed it is also used to denote a different feature, namely the use (or relatively strong use) of pitch, as opposed to other cues such as acoustic intensity, to give prominence (accent) to a syllable or mora within a word. The latter feature is dealt with in the article Pitch accent (intonation). ==Description== Pitch-accented languages may have a more complex accentual system than stress-accented languages, in that in some cases they have more than a binary distinction, but are less complex than fully tonal languages such as Chinese or Yoruba, which assign a separate tone to each syllable. For example, in Japanese short nouns (1-4 moras) may have a drop in pitch after any one mora, but more frequently on none at all, so that in disyllabic words followed by a particle there are three-way minimal contrasts such as ' "oyster" vs. ' "fence" vs. ' "persimmon". Ancient Greek words had high pitch on one of the last four vocalic morae in a word, and given that a vowel may have one or two morae, a syllable can be accented in one of four ways (high pitch, rising pitch, falling pitch, none). In addition, the mapping between phonemic and phonetic tone may be more involved than the simple one-to-one mapping between stress and dynamic intensity in stress-accented languages. Proto-Indo-European accent is usually reconstructed as a free〔The term ''free'' here refers to the position of the accent—its position was unpredictable by phonological rules, i.e. it could stand on any syllable of a word, regardless of its structure. This is opposed to ''fixed'' or ''bounded'' accent whose position is determined by factors such as the syllable quantity and/or position, e.g. in Latin where it's on the penultimate syllable if it's "heavy", antepenultimate otherwise.〕 pitch-accent system,〔 "From the available comparative evidence, it is standardly agreed that Proto-Indo-European was a pitch-accent language. There are numerous indications that the accented syllable was higher in pitch than the surrounding syllables. Among the Indo-European daughters, a pitch-accent system is found in Vedic Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, the Baltic languages and some South Slavic languages, although none of these preserves the original system intact."〕 preserved in Ancient Greek, Vedic, and Proto-Balto-Slavic. The Greek and Indic systems were lost: Modern Greek has a pitch produced stress accent, and it was lost entirely from Indic by the time of the Prākrits. Balto-Slavic retained Proto-Indo-European pitch accent, reworking it into the opposition of "acute" (rising) and "circumflex" (falling) tone, and which, following a period of extensive accentual innovations, yielded a pitch-accent based system that has been retained in modern-day Lithuanian and West South Slavic languages (in some dialects). Some other modern Indo-European languages have pitch accent systems, like Swedish and Norwegian, deriving from a stress-based system they inherited from Old Norse,〔Proto-Germanic had fixed accent on the first syllable of a phonetic word, a state of affairs preserved in oldest attested Germanic languages like Gothic, Old English and Old Norse. Free Proto-Indo-European accent was lost in Germanic rather late, after the operation of Verner's law.〕 and Punjabi, which developed tone distinctions that maintained lexical distinctions as consonants were conflated. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「pitch accent」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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