The point is that it's not a single, uniform feature and should therefor not be summarized in one single term. It's just a non-linguistic definition that actually means something completely different in musical (and psychological?) context.
What is described in melodic accent is actually called tonal word accent and this was first recorded in the 1920s by the German linguist Ernest A. Meyer in his two volume-work Die Intonation den Schwedischen ("The Intonation of Swedish"), and systematically described in Eva Gårding's The Scandinavian Word Accents (1977), based mostly on Meyer's material.
 14:55, May 18, 2005 (UTC)