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Observations on Sentential Stress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Arlene Berman  and
Michael Szamosi
Arlene Berman
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
Michael Szamosi
Affiliation:
Language Research Foundation and Harvard University
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Abstract

The hypothesis that the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) of English is the last rule within the syntactic cycle, as recently advanced in Bresnan 1971, is examined and rejected. It is shown to be observationally inadequate: it makes incorrect predictions and is unable, in principle, to capture generalizations about English prosodic stress. Evidence is presented showing that, to the extent that sentential stress depends on structure, it is surface structure that is relevant. The feasibility of assigning stress by means of the NSR, at any level, is seriously questioned, and various facts are presented which indicate that prosodic stress assignment cannot be a function of structure alone.*

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 1972 , pp. 304 - 325
Copyright
Linguistic Society of America 1972

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Footnotes

*

Work on this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Grants GS-2005 to Brandeis University and GS-2858 to Harvard University, and in part by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Grant OEC-0-70-4986 (823) to the Language Research Foundation. We would like to thank many professors, students, and neighbors for acting as informants, pronouncing long (and boring) lists of sentences for us. Particular thanks go to Stephen Anderson and David Perlmutter for offering many helpful comments and suggestions.

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