0 Introduction
In this chapter, we investigate the hypothesis that exceptional stress properties of English are under-represented in a systematic fashion.
What does under-representation mean here? It means that some phonological property occurs less often than expected. For example, in a sample of 19,528 English words, we find 3949 words with trochaic stress (σ´ σ˘ ) and 1416 words with final stress (σ˘σ´). On the assumption that both patterns should be equally likely, the latter class is clearly under-represented with respect to the former and a statistical comparison confirms this: χ2(1, N = 5365) = 1195.916, p < 0.05, Cramér's V = 0.472.
If we assume feet in English are generally trochaic, as argued, for example, by Hayes (1981), and assume the general framework of Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1993b), then in the case of a disyllable with final stress, its markedness could stem from the fact that the initial syllable is unfooted (Parse-σ) or it could stem from the fact that a monosyllabic foot is built (FtBin): σ˘ [σ´ ]. Both constraints would be violated by the winning candidate.
If we assume that it is avoidance of unfooted syllables that makes iambs marked and less common, then this predicts that forms like σ˘σ´σ˘ should also be under-represented; if what is driving the under-representation of σ˘σ´ is avoidance of monosyllabic feet, then no such prediction is made about forms like σ˘σ´σ˘. Interestingly, when we turn to three-syllables words, the facts confirm that it is monosyllabic feet that are avoided, not unparsed syllables. Forms like σ˘σ´σ˘ are much more frequent (1233) than words like σ`σ´σ˘ (159).
This is consistent with the general claim of Input Optimization (Hammond 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017) and thus provides an argument for that framework. The claim there is that input representations are skewed so as to reduce phonological complexity, the rank and number of violations exhibited by winning candidates. This chapter offers a statistical analysis of the distribution of exceptional stress in English, demonstrating that the distribution can be unified by assigning a penalty to constraint violations commensurate with the rankings of the constraints.