Shanti Ulfsbjorninn
UCL
2014-2015
ACTL
1. What is Word Stress?
Stress is probably the most phonological and abstract of the phonological concepts, and it is also, probably, the most pervasive.
There are no universal phonetic exponents of stress, and yet, defined properly, every language has stress
1
.
Stress can be expressed by any or all of the following: pitch, intensity, duration, or asymmetric segmental strength (consonant and vowel quality).
In exponence terms, the closest universal definition of stress would be ‘prominence’. That is to say, in every word there are some positions that are prominent and others that are not
2
.
While in internal terms the universal definition of word stress is strength. Interestingly, although there are no universal phonetic exponents of stress, the way stress interacts with the objects of phonology (consonant and vowel features, boundaries etc…) is roughly the same in all languages.
In this course, we will look for the best ways to formalise words stress. We will conclude, and I will try to convince you, that word stress is best understood as a grid system built up according to a principles and parameters model that takes into account a very small set of considerations and that is universal in its relationship to boundaries and in its effects on phonological objects within its domain, and that its internal function is to license the objects within its domain, and that its external function is almost entirely dedicated to string segmentation and parsing .
At the end of the course, you should see that the system built up before your eyes allows for a perspicacious understanding of the following empirical facts:
(1 ) Empirical facts of stress systems (from Halle and Vergnaud 1987)
(a) Not all [classes of] phonemes bear stress; different languages select specific subsets of phonemes to bear stress.
(b) In some languages, every word has one and only one stress.
1 Including, we know now, almost all tone languages.
2 Though this is not in itself obvious, because in some languages pitch alone is the phonetic exponence of stress and it is not immediately obvious why high pitch should be more prominent than a low pitch.

Shanti Ulfsbjorninn
UCL
2014-2015
ACTL
(c) In some languages, every word has at least one stress but may have more than one.
(d) The location of stress is often governed by fairly transparent principles
(i) In languages with a single stress per word the stress is determined by position within the word or with respect to the word-initial or word-final boundary, or to a context: [‘long vowel’, ‘closed syllable’, ‘not schwa’].
(ii) In the case of words with multiple stresses, there appear to be three major principles of distribution
(e) Stress and unstressed syllables alternate; for example, stress falls on every other syllable or every third syllable in a word.
(f) Stress falls on phonemes in particular environments- for example, on vowels with heavy syllables, or in lexically marked morphemes.
(g) A combination of the preceding.
(2) Further facts of stress systems
(a) Schwa and/or [ ɨ ] is/are routinely unstressed. Conversely, ‘sonority’ and stress are correlated. (De Lacy 2006).
(b) In many languages stress is dependent on whether a word ends with a final consonant, but there is no other evidence of closed heavy syllables.
(c) Closed syllables vary as to whether they contribute to syllable weight, sometimes this is even true within the same language, and sometimes not due to extrametricality (Hayes
1995).
Readings for Week 1:
Just ‘absorb’ the sense of the stress typology as shown in (WALS 13-16). Feel free to read the content of the (very short ‘chapters’) but don’t worry if you don’t really understand the terminology etc…
WALS http://wals.info/chapter/13 http://wals.info/chapter/14 http://wals.info/chapter/15 http://wals.info/chapter/16