falling, rising

"The matter is that what I denote as falling accent actually is falling to what the pitch of a following syllable would normally be. Likewise, what I denote as rising accent is rising from what the pitch of a preceding syllable would normally be. They actually do not control what the starting and finishing pitches, respectively, would be, but rather just the rate of fall or rise, respectively, from such.

It should be thus noted that a falling accent on a syllable can result in a syllable with an abnormally high starting pitch, particularly in monosyllables. Likewise, a rising accent on a syllable can result in a syllable with an abnormally low ending pitch, especially in monosyllables. So hence in monosyllables, paradoxically, falling pitches actually result in syllables that are abnormally high pitched overall and rising pitches actually result in syllables that are abnormally low pitched overall, as normally monosyllables have the pitch of a initial or final unstressed (rather than stressed) syllable in a multisyllable in the same position."

"On that note, one reason why I specifically avoid calling anything high pitch accent in the dialect here is that practically all primary stressed syllables in stressed multisyllabic words in the dialect here have an inherently high pitch independent of any pitch accent, which can be very high indeed in words that are particularly strongly stressed. (In this way the dialect here differs significantly from General American, which has far less overall pitch variation in words even when one discounts pitch accent.) Only in monosyllables does pitch accent actually correlate at all with the overall average pitch of a word, as monosyllables with non-level pitch accent act as if they were bisyllabic, and thus may have far higher pitches than monosyllables with level pitch accent, which are pronounced without any raised pitch even when strongly stressed."