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).

0 Introduction

There is no doubt that with the publication of The Sound Pattern of English by Chomsky and Halle in 1968 a new era began for phonology. This was by no means the first important publication in generative phonology (see for example Chomsky 1964, 1967; Halle 1959, 1962), but it was the first extensive application to English, yielding basic principles for a novel approach to the nature of phonological representations and processes. The cornerstone of The Sound Pattern of English (hereafter SPE) is its treatment of word stress. Whether for or against, specialists now had to contend with an original way of envisaging English word stress that underlined its regularity if one was ready to delve under the surface. Within the generative tradition itself there emerged a rich tapestry of revisions and counter-positions leading eventually to a number of radical overhauls of phonological theory. Our aim here is to survey some of these main revisions and to provide a route through a complex technical literature.

Of course, SPE was by no means the first work to deal with English word stress: the topic had been discussed by a wealth of publications, descriptive, pedagogical and theoretical. Although we focus here solely on the generative tradition, we emphasise that the background to SPE cannot be neglected. We have chosen to cover some of this ‘prehistory’ by dividing it into a British and an American tradition, and by selecting a few major figures that paved the way for SPE. In the British camp, we focus on the contrasting views of Daniel Jones and Roger Kingdon. In the United States, we consider the work of Leonard Bloomfield and John Samuel Kenyon, as well as some of the conclusions reached by various post-Bloomfieldian phonologists. Of course, each tradition is not monolithic in its treatment of stress: these studies have influenced one another, and similar ideas were defended on both sides of the Atlantic. It is against this backdrop that SPE came into the world.

In SPE, sets of ordered rules are postulated for English stress, linking underlying phonological representations to phonetic representations. Rules are applied cyclically by means of a universal transformational cycle, from the innermost constituents to the outermost.

0 Introduction

This chapter compares the two main groups of theories of word stress assignment in American English (General American, hereafter English), highlighting certain exceptional treatments in their accounts and identifying their limitations. It then briefly introduces a new approach that attempts to explain both exceptional and core (i.e. non-exceptional) examples in a unified way, together with an attempt to refine some of the new theory's limitations.

In section 1, we will look at certain types of exceptions to the theories. We will discuss one group of exceptional words to word stress treatments in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968) and subsequent studies (section 1.1), followed by discussion of a converse group of exceptional words to treatments in classic Optimality Theory (section 1.2). In section 2, by applying the recently developed Positional Function Theory (PFT) of Yamada (2010, 2013a), we will suggest a solution to these two groups of exceptional words relating to subsidiary stress assignment (section 2.1), followed by a brief introduction to the treatment of main stress assignment within the PFT framework (section 2.2). In section 3, we will consider a number of remaining issues in PFT: first, we will solve a problematic word type by employing the concept of Coordinate Axis Shift (section 3.1); second, we will look at the treatment of another problematic word type using the concept of Stress Domain in tandem with Stress Retraction (section 3.2); and third, we will examine the motivations for the two types of ‘primary–secondary’ word-stress treatments discussed in 3.1 and 3.2 (section 3.3). The advantages of PFT will be outlined in section 4. The chapter ends with conclusions in section 5.

1 Exceptions

1.1 One type of exception to treatments in SPE and subsequent studies

First to be mentioned here is The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968, hereafter SPE). In SPE, main and subsidiary stress assignment are comprehensively accounted for by the Main Stress Rule (MSR) and auxiliary rules with the help of the cyclic application of stress rules.

Take the còndênsátion word type, (1a) below, for example. This is a noun derived from the verb condénse.