| ROA: | 107 |
|---|---|
| Title: | On the nonuniformity of weight-to-stress and stress preservation effects in English |
| Authors: | Joe Pater |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 42 |
| Abstract: | On the nonuniformity of weight-to-stress and stress preservation effects in English Joe Pater McGill University Secondary stress placement in English is affected by syllable weight, by the placement of stress in the stem of a derived word, and by lexical idiosyncrasy. However, the effects of all of these factors is 'nonuniform', in the sense of Prince (1993): in some contexts they unequivocally determine stress placement, while in others they have little, or no effect. To the extent that it has been dealt with, this nonuniformity has tremendously complicated prior analyses of English stress. At the root of these complications is the tenet of inviolability, or full satisfaction. Once full satisfaction is replaced by Optimality Theoretic minimal violation, both descriptive and explanatory advances are made possible. In section 1 the usual, productive patterns of weight-to-secondary stress are accounted for in terms of a small set of ranked constraints. Section 2 contains a brief discussion of primary stress placement, demonstrating that quantity sensitive primary stress placement is compatible with the relatively low rank of the Weight-to-Stress constraint that the facts of secondary stress placement require. Section 3 examines lexical exceptions, and apparent cases of cyclic stress preservation, and argues for an account based both on stress preservation, formalized as prosodic faithfulness, and on lexically specific constraint ranking. By interspersing prosodic faithfulness constraints, and lexically specific constraints into the hierarchy established for regular stress, the same principles that determine regular prosodification can be used to straightforwardly and precisely capture the distribution of lexical, and stem based stress. Residual data, and issues, are discussed in appendices. Comments are welcome, and I would be happy to send a hard copy of the manuscript if downloading is impossible. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |