As in music, stress and accent in natural language are phenomenal prominences. A phenomenal prominence is always the most salient aspect of an acoustic contrast. A stress or accent might consist of a higher pitch, a greater amplitude, or a longer duration. It might also arise from differences in aspiration, vowel quality, or voicing. The primary purpose of stress and accent is to indicate a form’s temporal structure. It does this by indicating the positions of metrical prominences on the metrical grid. When phenomenal prominences correspond to metrical prominences, as they do in both music and language, they indicate the locations of metrical prominences and overall temporal organization. The key difference between metrical patterns in music and metrical patterns in language is that the former are typically more cyclic – or repetitive – than the latter with a more even distribution of prominences. Metrical organization is always rich and constructed automatically. Even when presented with a series of identical isochronous pulses, a hearer will automatically construct an analysis with multiple metrical levels. Stress and accent indicate which metrical analysis a listener should construct. This typically requires minimal information. A single accent per form can distinguish between the four perfect grid patterns, the simplest binary metrical patterns.

Chapter 9 summarizes the main points addressed in previous chapters. The main issues addressed in Chapter 1 are phenomenal prominence, metrical prominence, and the relationship between them. Chapter 2 addresses the Prosodic Hierarchy and structural prominence. Chapter 3 examines the typology of word stress. Chapter 4 examines two correspondence relationships: the relationship between prosodic categories and grid entries and the relationship between syntactic categories and prosodic categories. Directionality effects are addressed in Chapter 5, and grid well-formedness are addressed in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines boundary effects, and Chapter 8 focuses on feet.

The relationship between the metrical grid and the prosodic hierarchy and the relation between prosodic structure and syntactic structure are both relationships and relations of Correspondence. Correspondence is a representational link between two representational objects. Entries on the metrical grid and instances of prosodic categories may correspond, and instances of prosodic categories and instances of syntactic categories may correspond. Mapping is the correspondence relation between instances of prosodic categories and entries on the metrical grid. The mapping relation is one of the key factors influencing the grid’s construction. Mapping is governed by a handful of key principles, including Hierarchy Coordination. The prosodic hierarchy and the metrical grid are both hierarchies and they map to each other as hierarchies. Mapping is required by the violable MAP family of constraints, constraints that require prosodic categories to map to grid entries. The MATCH family of constraints requires faithful correspondence between prosodic categories and syntactic or morphological categories. It requires both that the correspondence relation exist and that that correspondents share key elements. Simple MATCH constraints require correspondents to have exactly the same set of terminal elements. LexMatch constraints require correspondents to have the same set of lexical terminal elements. LexMatch constraints ignore functional terminal elements.