Stress in Language 2

Stress in Language and "Stress" in Music

"Stress" in music (alternating pattern of strong and weak beats)
- Tendency for strong accents to be evenly spaced
- Tendency for S-W, S-W-W, or S-W-W-W groups and for hierarchical clustering into higher-level groups of 2, 3, or 4
- Functions?
Stress in language
- Numerous functions, only some of which (informativeness?, guide to production) are shared with music
- Seeming tendency for strong accents to be evenly spaced
- Is there a tendency for S-W, S-W-W, and S-W-W-W groups?

Languages with fixed word stress
- Hungarian: pörkölt, vadasan, burgonyasaláta
- French: lecture, impor tant, organisation
- Swahili: kumi, thelathini, nikikupenda
Languages with more complex word stress: English, Russian, Arabic
Words with variable stress in English: sixteen, sixteen; Tennessee, Tennessee
Phrase-level stress
BETter-than-average BAND leader

Initial observations
- In phrases the last word tends to be stressed, in compounds the first component
  a white house, John skied, three cows; the White Hous, cowboy
- Relative stress within a phrase tends to be maintained when it is embedded in a larger phrase
  whale-oil, whale-oil lamp
- It's complicated.
Stress hierarchies: syllables, feet, words, phrases, sentences
Binary hierarchy: at each level there is either one strong and one weak branch or only one strong or one weak branch
Tree -> stress assignment: stress assigned to a syllable is determined by the number of strong branches above it in the tree
Basic rules
- Within words
  - Normally make the left branch strong
  - If the right branch branches, make it strong
- Within phrases, make the second branch strong
  The structure of the phrase matters
pretty [little girls] vs. [pretty little] girls
Fixing stress clashes
- Clash: two strong nodes at a given level not separated by one or more weak nodes
- Strong-weak reversal to fix clash

Last updated: 14 November 1995
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~gasser/stress2.html
Comments: gasser@salsa.indiana.edu
Copyright 1995, The Trustees of Indiana University