9 - The phonology and phonetics of the Rhythm Rule

Summary

Introduction

The Rhythm Rule, the phenomenon responsible for the perceived rhythmic adjustment of adjacent stresses in such items as thirtéen and Tennessée vs. thírteen wómen and Tennessée législature, has received much attention in recent years from both the phonological and phonetic points of view. In this paper, we address issues relating to both the phonology and phonetics of the Rhythm Rule, and in particular, the relation between the two. Our investigation shows how the phonetic analysis of a phonological rule can provide insight where phonological analysis by itself is inconclusive. Finally, in our phonetic analysis, we not only investigate production data, but also data relative to the perception of our speech samples in order to determine how particular acoustic correlates of the Rhythm Rule are interpreted by listeners.

Background and issues addressed

Phonology

Of primary concern here are two treatments of the Rhythm Rule (RR) that have received broad acceptance, and which we will refer to as the Reversal Analysis (RA) and the Deletion Analysis (DA). According to the Reversal Analysis, when a clash arises between adjacent word stresses, the RR applies to alleviate this clash by shifting the primary stress of the first word from the final syllable to an earlier syllable in the word (e.g. Liberman, 1975; Liberman & Prince, 1977; Hayes, 1984), as illustrated in (1), where the level 3 grid marks indicate primary stress.