Abstract
This article argues that constraints regulating the distribution of metrical prominence must be able to reference fine-grained durational information. Evidence comes from an apparent segmental effect on stress in American English -ative: stress on -at- is more likely when it is preceded by an obstruent or a cluster (as in irrigative, integrative) than when it is preceded by a vowel or a sonorant consonant (as in palliative, speculative; Nanni 1977). I propose that this pattern should be understood as an effect of phonetically evaluated *LAPSE: longer lapses are penalized more severely than shorter ones. Results from two studies of speaker preferences for stress placement in nonce -ative forms support this proposal.
Highlights
The empirical focus of this paper is on the Nanni effect, a segmental effect on stress in American English –ative
This paper has argued that constraints regulating the distribution of prominences must be able to make reference to fine-grained durational information, on the basis of patterns in –ative forms
If the majority of evidence for phonetically-defined accentual constraints comes from rare Latinate forms, like the –ative and –ization cases discussed above, this result raises the question of how the English-learning child knows that phonetic versions of *LAPSE and *CLASH exist
Summary
The empirical focus of this paper is on the Nanni effect, a segmental effect on stress in American English –ative This effect is so-named after Nanni’s (1977) claim that if –ative is preceded by a vowel or a sonorant consonant (hereafter just “a sonorant”), –at- is stressless; if an obstruent or a cluster precedes –ative, –at- bears a secondary stress (1). This is likely because the Nanni effect appears, at first glance, to be something of an anomaly: English stress is not generally sensitive to such detailed segmental information. I briefly discuss the implications of this finding for our understanding of the constraints that regulate stress placement more generally
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