Abstract
Investigating the English primary stress in derived words, this paper shows that English is not a pure stress language, nor is it a pure tone language. It is an accentual language that can be better understood by way of an accentual and metrical approach. Previous studies, depending upon the division of suffixes into classes 1 and 2, do not achieve observational adequacy due to the incompatibility of stress shift with segment alternations. Hence, this paper claims that the two issues, stress and segment alternations, are fundamentally different in nature and hence should be explained with two different tools. Woo (2014) and Kim & Woo (2016) have dealt with the first issue of segment alternations in terms of affix reclassification. Complementary to these studies, this paper studies the remaining issue of stress in terms of the accentual types of English suffixes, and show that the stress issue is explained more adequately by way of adopting a new approach ‘accentual and metrical.’
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