0 Introduction

Australian English has received much attention with a view to describe and model the components of its lexicon and phonology while assessing its role and status in the English-speaking world. Recently, possibly because the Australian science of linguistics thoughtfully relies on national programmes of spoken corpus-making as well as on a broad landscape of laboratory phonology, some perceptual and acoustic analyses of stress and pitch accent have regularly been published, notably about High Rising Terminal (HRT) (for example Guy and Vonwiller 1989; Fletcher and Harrington 2001; Fletcher et al. 2002; Horvath 2004; Jespersen 2016). Other linguistic works have investigated the issue of lexical stress in Australian English phonology (Tabain et al. 2004).

Australian English is no homogeneous variety. The demonstration that multiple British dialectal origins at the root of its endogenous development led to a common systemic core (one transported English) under a determined evolutionary process of native Englishes must be balanced with the contemporary reality of phonological variation in Australian English (Przewozny and Viollain 2016). Furthermore, while language contact between British dialects of English has constantly played a crucial role from the early days of Proto-Early Australian English (for example Mitchell 1940; Turner 1966; Hill 1967; Bernard 1969; Fielding and Ramson 1973; Horvath 1985; Gunn 1992; Przewozny 2016), the influence of the Aboriginal input has to be considered too, both from the point of view of lexical stress in Aboriginal loanwords in Standard Australian English (Dixon 2002; Dixon et al. 2006; Martin 2011b) and that of the lexicon of Standard Aboriginal English (Malcolm and Kaldor 1991; Eades 1993; Vinson 2008 among others).

The scope of this chapter is (i) to analyse the nature of lexical stress patterns in Aboriginal loanwords in Standard Australian English (SAusE), (ii) to present a systemic account of lexical stress in SAusE based on dictionary data, and (iii) to examine the common hypothesis that speakers of Standard Australian Aboriginal English (SAbE) have a tendency to stress words initially in contemporary spoken data.

Our theoretical stance is a Guierrian one (see Chapters 2 and 5 of this volume) inasmuch as dictionary data, morphological and orthographic information can support the systematic study of the Australian lexicon.

The idea for this book emerged from conversations among participants at the 2015 conference in France entitled ‘PAC 2015: Variation, Change and Spoken Corpora – Advances in the Phonology and Phonetics of Contemporary English’. Jacques Durand made the initial call for the book, devised the plan for its implementation, and set it in motion. Anne Przewozny and Eiji Yamada then took over the editing of the book but, due to the busy schedule of the editors, the pace of progress was slow. Later, Nicolas Ballier and Jean-Michel Fournier joined us as editors. In the end, it took six years after the original plan to publish the book, which is an incredibly long incubation period. However, the significance of publishing this book has never wavered in spite of all the difficulties, including the COVID pandemic that began at the end of 2019 and is not yet under control as of this writing.

The reason our plan did not vanish is that we believe stress is an important subject. It has been one of the central issues in research since the early days of linguistics. Its study became more active in the twentieth century, especially with the work of Daniel Jones and Leonard Bloomfield, and was taken over by the generative phonology of Chomsky and Halle (1968) (hereafter SPE). Since then, no study of word stress in English has been possible without reference to this work, whether one accepts the SPE view or not. Despite the importance of the subject, although a number of papers have been written, in more than fifty years there have been (to the editors’ knowledge) only a few monographs in this tradition that have analysed word stress in English as a central issue. These include Fudge (1984), Burzio (1994), Hammond (1999), Wenszky (2004), Yamada (2010) and Zamma (2013).

Research on word stress in English since SPE can be roughly divided into ‘pre-Optimality Theory (pre-OT)’ and OT. Significant theories of ‘pre-OT’ include Segmental Phonology in SPE, Metrical Phonology in Liberman (1975), Liberman and Prince (1977), Hayes (1980, 1982), Prince (1983) and others, Lexical Phonology in Mohanan (1982) and Kiparsky (1982a, 1982b) and others, and later theory in Halle and Vergnaud (1987).

This volume materialises the many exchanges that took place during the PAC (Phonologie de l’Anglais Contemporain/Phonology of Contemporary English) international conference entitled ‘Variation, Change and Spoken Corpora: Advances in the Phonology and Phonetics of Contemporary English’ at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France, in 2015. The chapters in this volume are not replicas of the talks that were given at the conference, as these are not proceedings. Rather, this volume is evidence to the open-ended nature of the research endeavour and to the beneficial role of the exchanges between researchers in fashioning and furthering the debate on many different issues.

Since 2004, what started as Jacques Durand’s idea for a local team project in Toulouse has developed into a research programme with a national and international scientific community, regular international conferences, and senior and junior researchers as well as PhD students. It has done so by setting collaborative goals for the creation of a large database on contemporary oral English, coming from a wide variety of linguistic areas in the English-speaking world (such as Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and the USA), and by acknowledging the need for a larger methodological and theoretical debate on the scientific legitimacy and relevance of corpus phonology as one of the many fields of linguistic research.

The phonological foundation for the PAC programme is best summarised as follows (Durand 2017):