1. A language may have an accent, a prominent segment per word or comparable unit, something which is often called ‘stress’ in English, but accent is a functional reality, which may involve, for its actualization, stress, pitch, length, or any combination of these; or it has no accent: most European languages have an accent; Vietnamese and many Central African languages have no accent. 2.The place of accent is either predictable and non-distinctive, or non-predictable and consequently distinctive: it is predictable in Czech where the accent falls on the first syllable of the word, in Polish where it falls in the penult, in classical Latin where its place is determined by syllable length; it is unpredictable in Spanish where a significant unit characterized by the phoneme succession /termino/ may mean three different things according to the place of the accent.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.85

A common error consists in ascribing to a vast ill-defined domain of intonation a number of features which functionally belong to that of accent. The use of ‘stress’, which refers to a physical reality, instead of ‘accent’ is apt to confuse even competent scholars and make them speak of intonation as soon as they fancy they are hearing pitch instead of stress: for many of them, the difference between 'to increase' and 'an increase' would be due to a different placing of stress, while that between 'a móving van' (a van used for moving furniture) and 'a moving ván' (a van in motion) results from the use of a different intonational contour. Once accent is defined, not in reference to an alleged physical nature, but as prominence given to one syllable per word, or accentual unit, with a view to marking the respective importance of the units within the utterance, it becomes clear that the difference between 'móving van' and 'moving ván' is accentual and nothing else.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.35

That such intonational habits exist need not be further substantiated. They are some of the features that often enable people to state that some person has this of that ‘accent’. But it remains to be determined how far such habits actually hamper or prevent individual uses of the natural implications of speech melody.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.38

We all, in daily life, speak, and sometimes act, as if there existed neatly circumscribed language communities wherein all members are expected to behave linguistically in exactly the same way. Those who do not, in all details, are said to speak with an ‘accent’ if their deviation from an assumed norm are mainly phonic. They are supposed to speak a ‘dialect’ if their aberrance extends to grammar and lexicon, particularly if communication is thereby somewhat impaired. As long as linguists were ‘philologists’ who mainly concentrated on written, literary forms of human communication, they were not inclined to take exception to this sketchy and naïve approach to socio-linguistics: ‘accents’ were hardly ever noticeable as such in their texts, and ‘dialects’ were best forgotten about except, perhaps, in the isolated case of ancient Greek.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.103