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.

Pavel Iosad, Senior Lecturer, Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Björn Köhnlein, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University

Pavel Iosad is Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He joined the Department of Linguistics and English Language as Lecturer in Theoretical Phonology in 2013. Prior to coming to Edinburgh, he was Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Ulster. He trained at Moscow State University and the University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway.

Björn Köhnlein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University, having previously held a position as Assistant Professor at Leiden University. His core expertise is phonology - particularly interactions of metrical structure, (intonational) tone, and segmental structure - and its interfaces with phonetics and morphology, from both a synchronic and a diachronic typological perspective.