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Glite Dictionary
accentual

accentual

8.6
About the way strong beats happen in speech or poetry
  • adjective
  • /ækˈsɛnʧuəl/
  • Specialized
translation icon : acentual
  • The surrounding poems tend, moreover, either towards conventional iambic meter, in which stress alternates with unstress, or truly accentual meters, in which beats are clear and syllables need not be counted.
  • accentual hexameter
  • accentual verse
  • accentual meter

Examples

  • Winters apparently saw free verse as a new variant of English accentual meter.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • The lingering or pausing at the point of the internal enjambments in this strongly accentual poem can be felt as a silent or virtual beat.

    Academic text (2016)

  • Did he entertain the possibility that the accentual hexameter might work in English before rejecting it?

    Academic text (2016)

  • I do not agree with Winters's statement that "Wyatt employs the accentual variety of sprung rhythm."

    Fiction book (2000)

  • Prins presents Arnold as the champion of the accentual dactylic hexameter as crucially important for a modern English nation.

    Academic text (2016)

  • "As soon as Williams had ceased to imitate Keats and had abandoned rhyme and accentual-syllabic meter, he began to cast about for something to take its place.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • Are they accentual dactylic hexameters at times preceded by anacrustic syllables, as Haynes argues?

    Academic text (2016)

  • Despite his willingness to play with verse forms imported from other languages, he scorned the accentual hexameter line conceived as a translation into English of the Greek dactylic hexameter.

    Academic text (2016)

  • Both Phelan and Meredith Martin invoke Edwin Guest and others for whom Anglo-Saxon accentual alliterative verse was English poetry's native ground.

    Academic text (2016)

  • In poetry, understanding accentual rhythms helps in appreciating the stress patterns of the verses.

Synonyms

prosodic
vsaccentual
  • Specialized
8.8

Describes the rhythm and melody of speech, like pitch, stress and pauses

focuses mainly on stress and prominence rather than wider rhythm or pitch

Antonyms

quantitative
  • Literature
1 7.9

Using syllable length, not stress, to make the poem's rhythm

syllabic
  • Literature
7.0

Lines of poetry measured by the number of syllables rather than stress

unaccented
  • Specialized
6.3

Parts of words that you say without strong stress

Compounds

accentual system
  • Specialized
8.0

A set of rules for which parts of words have stress in a language

Surface Forms

accentual positive

Morphology

accentual = accent (transparent) = accent + ual

The adjective is directly formed from the noun 'accent' with the productive suffix '-ual' meaning 'relating to', so learners who know 'accent' can infer the meaning.

Etymology

Accentual comes from accent, which itself comes from the Latin parts ad- meaning 'to' and cantare meaning 'to sing'. Think of an 'accent' as a little 'song' or beat on a syllable when you speak, so accentual describes the stressed beats or rhythm in speech and poetry.