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In English poetry, accent refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress.
A prominent syllable or word is said to be accented or tonic; the latter term does not imply that it carries phonemic tone. Other syllables or words are said to be unaccented or atonic . Syllables are frequently said to be in pretonic or post-tonic position, and certain phonological rules apply specifically to such positions.
Accentual verse was a traditionally common prosody in Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland and Britain. [2] Accentual verse has been widespread in English poetry since its earliest recording, with Old English poetry written in a special form of accentual verse termed alliterative verse, of which Beowulf is a notable example.
Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable.
Pitch-accent languages tend to fall into two categories: those with a single pitch-contour (for example, high, or high–low) on the accented syllable, such as Tokyo Japanese, Western Basque, or Persian; and those in which more than one pitch-contour can occur on the accented syllable, such as Punjabi, Swedish, or Serbo-Croatian. In this latter ...
the diaeresis (Zoë), indicating a second syllable in two consecutive vowels; the macron (English poetry marking, lēad pronounced / l iː d /, not / l ɛ d /), lengthening vowels, as in Māori; or indicating omitted n or m (in pre-Modern English, both in print and in handwriting).
In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is ὀξεῖα (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as acūta "sharpened".
The first syllable of a word is the initial syllable and the last syllable is the final syllable. In languages accented on one of the last three syllables, the last syllable is called the ultima , the next-to-last is called the penult , and the third syllable from the end is called the antepenult.