[stress]

Counterpart

[-stress]

Feature System

Definition

Stress is a prosodic feature that “refers to increased prominence [of a] certain syllable or syllables” (Gordon 2011:141). Stress is “detectable via loudness, length, and intonation” (Kennedy 2017:265).

Purpose

Stress works alongside other prosodic features, such as length, accent, tone, intonation, pitch, etc. to provide morphological information about segments (Kennedy 2017:292).

History

Although Chomsky and Halle never formally define stress, they do begin sketching the phonology of English by contrasting the difference between the primary stress of a compound, as in bla¹ckboa²rd (a combining superstrike in SPE, but shown here for typographic reasons as a superscript), compared to the adjective plus noun sequence, bla²ck boa¹rd. Chomsky and Halle propose that phonetic features “are scales that admit a fixed number of values” (1968:298), while their classificatory function, a feature “is a physical scale defined by two points, which are designated by autonomous adjectives: high-nonhigh, voiced-nonvoiced (voiceless), tense-nontense (lax)” (1968:299). In the case of English stress, SPE recognizes not only the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, but for English, three degrees of stress are posited.

Since then, the exploration of stress has proved itself to be a fruitful endeavor, with the advent of generative metrical stress theory in the 1970s and 80s. The constraint-based framework of Optimality Theory has also provided great insight into the function of stress (Gordon 2011:141). In early generative literature, the binary feature [stress] was used for French (Schane 1973:64-65).

In his dissertation, Hayes (1980) explores deeper into the claims made in Lieberman and Prince’s 1977 work that proposed stress be represented as a “matter of relative prominence among syllables, rather than as a degree of absolute prominence attached to each vowel” (Hayes 1980:7). He goes on to suggest that the most accurate way of representing metrical stress is by using “binary branching tree structures, in which each pair of sister nodes is labeled [s w] or [w s], depending on which node is stronger” (ibid.).

References

Chomsky, Noam; and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.

Gordon, Matthew. 2011. Stress systems. The handbook of phonological theory ed. by John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu 2.141-163. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.

Hayes, Bruce. 1980. A metrical theory of stress rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Dissertation.

Kennedy, Robert. 2017. Phonology: A coursebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schane, Sanford A. 1973. Generative phonology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Author

Ainsley Graf