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).
