On Stress and Linguistic

In this essay a new theory of stress and linguistic rhythm will be elaborated, based on the proposals of Liberman (1975).' It will be argued that certain features of prosodic systems like that of English, in particular the phenomenon of "stress subordination", are not to be referred primarily to the properties of individual segments (or syllables), but rather reflect a hierarchical rhythmic structuring that organizes the syllables, words, and syntactic phrases of a sentence. The character of this structuring, properly understood, will give fresh insight into phenomena that have been apprehended in terms of the phonological cycle, the stress-subordination convention, the theory of disjunctive ordering, and the use of crucial variables in phonological rules. Our theory will employ two basic ideas about the representation of traditional prosodic concepts: first, we represent the notion relative prominence in terms of a relation defined on constituent structure; and second, we represent certain aspects of the notion linguistic rhythm in terms of the alignment of linguistic material with a "metrical grid". The perceived "stressing" of an utterance, we think, reflects the combined influence of a constituent-structure pattern and its grid alignment. This pattern-grid combination is reminiscent of the traditional picture of verse scansion, so that the theory as a whole deserves the name "metrical". We will also use the expression "'metrical theory" as a convenient term for that portion of the theory which deals with the assignment of relative prominence in terms of a relation defined on constituent structure. Section 1 will apply the metrical theory of stress-pattern assignment to the system of English phrasal stress, arguing this theory's value in rationalizing otherwise arbitrary characteristics of stress features and stress rules. Section 2 will extend this treatment to the domain of English word stress, adopting a somewhat traditional view of the assignment of the feature [+stress], but explaining the generation of word-level * We would like to thank