9 - A Solution to Theoretical Shortcomings in the Stress Assignment of Words in English

Summary

0 Introduction

This chapter compares the two main groups of theories of word stress assignment in American English (General American, hereafter English), highlighting certain exceptional treatments in their accounts and identifying their limitations. It then briefly introduces a new approach that attempts to explain both exceptional and core (i.e. non-exceptional) examples in a unified way, together with an attempt to refine some of the new theory's limitations.

In section 1, we will look at certain types of exceptions to the theories. We will discuss one group of exceptional words to word stress treatments in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968) and subsequent studies (section 1.1), followed by discussion of a converse group of exceptional words to treatments in classic Optimality Theory (section 1.2). In section 2, by applying the recently developed Positional Function Theory (PFT) of Yamada (2010, 2013a), we will suggest a solution to these two groups of exceptional words relating to subsidiary stress assignment (section 2.1), followed by a brief introduction to the treatment of main stress assignment within the PFT framework (section 2.2). In section 3, we will consider a number of remaining issues in PFT: first, we will solve a problematic word type by employing the concept of Coordinate Axis Shift (section 3.1); second, we will look at the treatment of another problematic word type using the concept of Stress Domain in tandem with Stress Retraction (section 3.2); and third, we will examine the motivations for the two types of ‘primary–secondary’ word-stress treatments discussed in 3.1 and 3.2 (section 3.3). The advantages of PFT will be outlined in section 4. The chapter ends with conclusions in section 5.

1 Exceptions

1.1 One type of exception to treatments in SPE and subsequent studies

First to be mentioned here is The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968, hereafter SPE). In SPE, main and subsidiary stress assignment are comprehensively accounted for by the Main Stress Rule (MSR) and auxiliary rules with the help of the cyclic application of stress rules.

Take the còndênsátion word type, (1a) below, for example. This is a noun derived from the verb condénse.