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.*
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