Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2008
Although primary word stress regularly falls on the penult in Polish and on the antepenult in Macedonian, there are a number of lexical exceptions in both languages. In the first generative treatment of such exceptions, Comrie (1976) suggested two unrelated diacritic features, [± stressable] for Polish and [ ± never posttonic] for Macedonian, in order to accommodate the accentual paradigms exhibited by exceptional words within the framework of Chomsky & Halle (1968). More recently, metrical accounts of exceptional stress have been proposed in Franks (1985), Halle & Vergnaud (1987) and Rubach & Booij (1985) for Polish and in Franks (1987, forthcoming) and Halle & Vergnaud (1987) for Macedonian. These analyse deviations from the regular patterns in the two languages in completely unrelated ways – in Polish exceptional stress is a consequence of idiosyncratic extrametricality, whereas in Macedonian it results from the idiosyncratic presence of an inherent accent. Responding to this type of analysis, Hammond (1989) argues that an alternative treatment in which exceptional stress in both languages is treated similarly is conceptually more elegant and descriptively superior. He accomplishes this by employing roughly the same set of stress rules for Polish and Macedonian, with the exception that lexical accent is interpreted differently in the two languages.