2 - English Word Stress and the Guierrian School

Summary

0 Introduction

At the end of the sixties, Lionel Guierre had been studying English stress for a number of years in view of a French doctoral dissertation when Chomsky and Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (1968, hereafter SPE), a truly revolutionary view of the workings of English stress, though its actual concern was more likely to have been linguistics and phonological theory than English stress per se. In view of what he considered a momentous scientific event, Guierre took the rare decision to re-start his analysis from scratch by resorting to computer analysis, which was becoming more easily available to scientists at the time. Let us recall that at the time, the challenge was daunting: each entry of Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (12th edition) had to be transferred on to a punched card, with an appropriate and efficient coding transfer, even before attempting any kind of systematic analysis. Guierre finally succeeded in completing his analysis of the very first computerised corpus of English pronunciation by the end of the seventies, when he presented his doctoral dissertation which allowed him to become the first Professor of English pronunciation in the history of French university.

Except for a few specialists around the world, his dissertation remained mostly unknown, however, as it was never published as such: unlike Chomsky and Halle's book, its scope was strictly limited to English stress and pronunciation, with no linguistic theoretical ambitions. Guierre's work is best known through his Drills in English Stress-Patterns (1984a), a book aimed at students of English as a foreign language, but with a foreword by A. C. Gimson himself:

L. Guierre has carried out a computer analysis of the stress-patterns of the majority of words in the Jones English Pronouncing Dictionary and has been able to derive from this analysis sufficient rules of general validity to be of great practical help for the foreign learner. […]

The tendencies of word-stress which have emerged are likely to reflect the underlying rules which the native English speaker has as part of his linguistic generative capability […]

(Guierre 1984a: 7)