The accenting of contextually 'given' information constitutes a problem for analyses that regard accents as correlating only with 'new' information. It will be shown that the accenting of 'given' information is explainable as resulting from general metrical well-formedness conditions on prosodic constituents. Units higher than the word are seen to obey the same metrical constraints that are present at the word level. Key Words: 'new information', 'given information', accentual phrase, intermediate phrase, tone-unit, prosodic structure, metrical structure, deaccenting, rhythm.