The analysis we are about to present is driven by two main intuitions that have eluded past accounts. One is that the mechanisms that assign stresses to final and non-final portions of words, resulting, for example, in the two stresses of wìnnepessáukee, cannot be independent or unrelated. Given the availability of one mechanism that organizes the final portion of a word into a foot, there is every reason to believe that that same mechanism would be available to construct all other feet. The second intuition is that there cannot be rules of “destressing.” In the conceptual structure of a theory of stress, the need for destressing only stands to indicate that the stressing mechanisms are incorrect, which should prompt a search for the correct ones. As we will argue, both the need to have more than one parsing mechanism operating across the word, and the need for destressing rules, which have characterized past analyses, are contingencies of a certain hypothesis about word edges, generally known as “extrametricality.” We will argue that that hypothesis, which has been useful in important respects and duly influential, is nonetheless incorrect in its specific implementation. Our framework will introduce a different, though still partly related, hypothesis about word edges, which we will show does not incur the two above problems.

The analysis we will propose is rather simple, and can be given in its essentials in this brief introduction.