1 - On the Treatment of English Word Stress within the Generative Tradition: History, Concepts and Debates

Summary

0 Introduction

There is no doubt that with the publication of The Sound Pattern of English by Chomsky and Halle in 1968 a new era began for phonology. This was by no means the first important publication in generative phonology (see for example Chomsky 1964, 1967; Halle 1959, 1962), but it was the first extensive application to English, yielding basic principles for a novel approach to the nature of phonological representations and processes. The cornerstone of The Sound Pattern of English (hereafter SPE) is its treatment of word stress. Whether for or against, specialists now had to contend with an original way of envisaging English word stress that underlined its regularity if one was ready to delve under the surface. Within the generative tradition itself there emerged a rich tapestry of revisions and counter-positions leading eventually to a number of radical overhauls of phonological theory. Our aim here is to survey some of these main revisions and to provide a route through a complex technical literature.

Of course, SPE was by no means the first work to deal with English word stress: the topic had been discussed by a wealth of publications, descriptive, pedagogical and theoretical. Although we focus here solely on the generative tradition, we emphasise that the background to SPE cannot be neglected. We have chosen to cover some of this ‘prehistory’ by dividing it into a British and an American tradition, and by selecting a few major figures that paved the way for SPE. In the British camp, we focus on the contrasting views of Daniel Jones and Roger Kingdon. In the United States, we consider the work of Leonard Bloomfield and John Samuel Kenyon, as well as some of the conclusions reached by various post-Bloomfieldian phonologists. Of course, each tradition is not monolithic in its treatment of stress: these studies have influenced one another, and similar ideas were defended on both sides of the Atlantic. It is against this backdrop that SPE came into the world.

In SPE, sets of ordered rules are postulated for English stress, linking underlying phonological representations to phonetic representations. Rules are applied cyclically by means of a universal transformational cycle, from the innermost constituents to the outermost.