Stress

This unit examines stress. Stress manifests itself in pitch, duration, and loudness. In a word, the stressed units, that is, syllables or moras, tend to have higher pitch, longer duration, and increased amplitude, though their importance as markers of stress varies from language to language. As this unit shows, stress is predictable. Languages can differ in how and where stress is assigned, but they exhibit shared characteristics. This unit, which comprises three chapters, is devoted to this phenomenon. Chapter 17 presents stress data from Pintupi, Wargamay, and Choctaw. These three languages are selected to highlight the typical patterns of stress and their crosslinguistic variations. This chapter also introduces the Metrical Theory (MT) of stress and shows how it handles stress in the three languages. Two key claims of MT are that syllables are organized into larger constituents known as feet and that feet are responsible for the rhythmic property of stress. This metrical account of stress is juxtaposed with the view of stress based on Optimality Theory (OT) in Chapter 18. We show that though OT abandons the rule approach to foot construction, it draws significant insights from MT. These two chapters present a comparison of MT and OT and highlight their strengths and drawbacks. Chapter 19 analyzes the interactions between stress and epenthesis in Yimas, whose normal stress assignment seems to be both impacted and not impacted by epenthesis. This chapter highlights the problem posed by this pattern interaction problem for Derivational Theory and some of the advantages for OT. Through these three chapters, this unit develops your understanding of the phonetic properties and phonological patterns of stress and showcases how patterns of stress are identified and analyzed.