On English sentence stress and the nature of metrical structure

Abstract

This essay is concerned with a section of the suprasegmental phonology of English that has traditionally been called ‘sentence stress’: a domain that goes beyond the simple word and its accent, covering prominence relations within lexical compounds and syntactic phrases. Some almost commonplace assumptions are usually made about sentence stress in the phonological literature of English: first, that the distinction between compound stress and phrasal stress leads to a phonological contrast, so that in a compound noun likeblack boardthe left-hand constituent is the stronger one whereas in a phrase,black boardfor example, the right-hand one is. Second, that this prominence differentiation consists of a further contouring of the main stresses of the simple words involved so that word stress serves as input for sentence stress differentiation, as inGérman tèachervs.Gèrman téacher. Also frequently observed is a class of exceptions to this second assumption: thethìrteen méncases, where the primary stress of a word in isolation,thirtéen, gets shifted in certain contexts for rhythmic reasons.