Stress and accent are central to the study of sound systems in language. This book surveys key work carried out on stress and accent and provides a comprehensive conceptual foundation to the field. It offers an up-to-date set of tools to examine stress and accent from a range of perspectives within metrical stress theory, connecting the acoustic phenomenon to a representation of timing, and to groupings of individual speech sounds. To develop connections, it draws heavily on the results of research into the perception of musical meter and rhythm. It explores the theory by surveying the types of stress and accent patterns found among the world's languages, introducing the tools that the theory provides, and then showing how the tools can be deployed to analyse the patterns. It includes a full glossary and there are lists of further reading materials and discussion points at the end of each chapter.