Distributional Stress Regularity: A Corpus Study

Abstract

The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on distributional stress regularity, which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and durational stress regularity, which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. Lexical stress patterning refers to normal stress patterns within words; interlexical stress patterning refers to patterns that arise from word combinations; and contextual stress patterning refers to adjustments in normal lexical stress patterns (such as the well-known phenomenon of "stress clash avoidance"). A corpus study was done to assess the effect of these three factors on distributional stress regularity in conversational and formal spoken English, by comparing the degree of stress regularity in stress-annotated corpus data to randomly manipulated versions of the data and to "citation-form" stress patterns drawn from a phonetic dictionary. The results show that both lexical and interlexical patterning contribute significantly to stress regularity in English; contextual stress patterning does not, and in fact significantly reduces regularity in comparison to citation-form stress patterns.