Accentual

Accentual is an adjective relating to accent or stress in speech. In linguistics and poetics, it describes systems where rhythm is organized around the placement and number of stressed syllables rather than simply counting all syllables. In this sense, accentual describes a class of prosodic patterns and meters.

In prosody, accentual verse is a type of meter in which lines are defined by a fixed number of stressed syllables; the total syllable count can vary. This contrasts with syllabic verse, which fixes the number of syllables per line, and with accentual-syllabic verse, which fixes both syllable counts and stresses. Accentual verse is often associated with medieval and early modern English and with alliterative poetry, where the rhythm comes from stress and alliteration rather than a precise syllable tally.

In poetry studies, the term is used to describe historical forms such as Old English alliterative verse and certain ballads where the pattern of stressed syllables governs the line structure. In contemporary analysis, researchers may describe the rhythm of a language or text as accentual when their primary focus is the distribution of stress rather than exact syllable counts.

Outside poetry, accentual can refer to general phenomena relating to accent or stress in a language’s phonology, such as stress placement, prominence, or intonational patterns. Some discussions use “accentual” to distinguish stress-based rhythm from tone or vowel quantity, depending on the linguistic tradition.