Blackwell Reference Online

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The fundamental insight into stress systems remains that expressed by Mark Liberman in his 1975 dissertation. Liberman suggested that stress is not a simple phonetic feature, as had been assumed by most linguists and phone-ticians, but rather that it is a phonetic means for marking various kinds of groupings of linguistic elements. Typical examples of the kinds of groupings Liberman had in mind are given in (1). (1)  (a) auto/bio/graphic one/mato/poeia super/cali/fragi/expi/alo/docious (b) their new Lincoln Continental/was made in California non of his books/made it the top of the list It is not difficult to see that in each of the groups or constituents there is one element that is more prominent than the rest. It is the left-most elements in (1a) and the right-most elements in (1b). We shall use the term “head” to designate the element in the constituent to which prominence is assigned. In addition, the examples in (1a) differ from those in (1b) with regard to the elements that are being grouped. Syllables are grouped in (1a) and words in (1b). This difference is also reflected in the units that are made to stand out phonetically: it is the head of the syllable in (1a), whereas in (1b) it is the head of the syllable bearing main stress in the word. In what follows we describe and illustrate a new algorithm - that of Idsardi (1992) - which seems to us to assign stress contours ... log in or subscribe to read full text