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Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2002

Joe Pater
Joe Pater
Affiliation:
University of Alberta and University of Massachusetts
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Abstract

The principles determining secondary stress placement in English display considerable non-uniformity (Prince 1993) in their application. While in some contexts a syllable will be stressed if it is heavy, or if it is stressed in the stem of a derived form, in other environments syllable weight and stem stress do not entail secondary stress. To take a relatively straightforward case, the primary stress of the stems in (1a) is preserved as a secondary stress in the derived forms (cf. monomorphemic T`tamagóuchi with initial stress), but stress preservation systematically fails in words like (1b). Here we have phonologically conditioned non-uniformity; stress preservation on light syllables is blocked in the environment of a following primary stress.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , August 2000 , pp. 237 - 274
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Thanks to Eric Baković, Bruce Derwing, Laura Downing, Elan Dresher, Edward Flemming, Heather Goad, Kevin Hynna, Bill Idsardi, René Kager, Greg Lamontagne, John McCarthy, Armin Mester, Alan Prince, Doug Pulleyblank, Su Urbanczyk, Wolf Wikeley and the participants in classes at Rutgers University, University of British Columbia, University of Alberta and University of Massachusetts, Amherst for help and discussion. I would like to particularly acknowledge Bruce Hayes and Michael Kenstowicz for very detailed and useful comments on the manuscript, as well as Glyne Piggott for his encouragement and discussion of many previous versions of this analysis. This research was supported by SSHRCC fellowship 752-93-2773, and by SSHRCC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful.