5 - The Stress Patterns of English Verbs: Syllable Weight and Morphology

Summary

0 Introduction

Most studies about English verb stress, however interesting from a theoretical point of view, seem to be based on limited sets of examples, leading their authors to assertions about the stress behaviour of English that are not actually vindicated through comprehensive data. Following Lionel Guierre's teachings, this study sets out to analyse as comprehensive a corpus as possible, based on dictionary data: though limited in some extent by the very nature of the source, it can still be seen as a first step towards a reliable description of the category. The chapter is structured as follows: first, we review the literature on English stress and distinguish two generalisations which were proposed in Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English (section 1). One generalisation refers to the weight of the final syllable of verbs while the other refers to the presence of a semantically opaque prefix. We then set out to evaluate the empirical validity of these two generalisations, as well as to propose a global overview of how English verbs are stressed, all morphological categories included. In section 2, we present how the data were collected, cleaned and classified. In the following section, we detail the stress distributions found in all the morphological categories found in the data (section 3). At the end of the presentation of our results, we measure the empirical validity of the two generalisations in the relevant morphological categories and show that they have similar efficiencies but different theoretical costs. Crucially, we find that the data support an analysis including semantically opaque morphological constituents among the possible determiners of stress.

1 English verbs: stress, syllable structure and morphology

1.1 The two generalisations

In Chomsky and Halle (1968, hereafter SPE), there are two parameters determining the position of primary stress in verbs that many morphologists would now analyse as monomorphemic. The first parameter is the segmental make-up of the final syllable. In their Main Stress Rule, a verb gets penultimate stress if the final syllable contains a ‘weak cluster’ (V̆C; for example astónish, édit, consíder, imágine, intérpret) and final stress otherwise (for example maintáin, eráse, appéar, collápse, exháust, tormént, usúrp). Since Kahn (1976), the terms ‘weak cluster’ or ‘strong cluster’ have been abandoned and replaced by the notion of syllable weight.