Flexibility of English stress.

Abstract

This dissertation provides an account of stress flexibility in English. Stress is flexible in the sense that words that apparently have the same segmental composition, such as <italic>Canada</italic> and <italic>banana </italic>, may differ in their stress patterns. Unlike current approaches (Halle & Verganud 1987; Hayes 1995; Halle 1998; Hammond 1999) which consider only some stress patterns to be regular and all the rest exceptional, the present proposal views all words as regular and develops a theory that accommodates this view. The theory is based on surface well-formedness constraints (T ROCHEE, FOOTBINARITY, PRE-P ARSE-2, and WEIGHT-STRESS), silent beats, and dual-counting foot structures. The advantages of this approach are numerous. First, the theoretical constructs are universal, i.e. have few exceptions. Second, the analysis is simpler in as much as it makes fewer assumptions. Third, the assumptions have all been proposed for English by others in the field.