In some schools of phonetics, sounds are distinguished as grave or acute. This is a perceptual classification, based on whether the sounds are perceived as having a secondary, lesser intensity emphasis (grave), or a primary, higher intensity emphasis (acute). The accents can also be classified acoustically, with acute sounds occupying a higher frequency on the audio spectrum than grave, or in terms of their differing articulations.
Modern relevance
The grave/acute distinction has lost its relevance in modern phonetics, but it may still be relevant to other disciplines. The distinction dates from relatively early in the days of acoustic phonetics, at a time that some phonologists believed that one could categorize all speech sounds by a finite set of acoustically defined distinctive features, which were supposed to correspond to auditory impressions of sounds. The pioneering publication was Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1951) Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (MIT). Grave/acute was defined primarily in acoustic terms (with some reference to auditory qualities), but sounds were given a secondary description (or gloss) in terms of their articulation. Features like grave/acute could be used to divide speech sounds into broad classes. For most phoneticians, the JF&H features had been superseded by 1968 by the articulatory features set out in Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English and by competing articulatory features devised by Ladefoged in such publications as Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics (1971). ==References==