What is the nature of stress in English nominal compounds?

Abstract

Traditional theories of phonology maintain that nominal compounds have a [1/3] stress pattern whereas nominal phrases are characterized by [2/1] stress [N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (Harper and Row, New York, 1968)]. However, there does not appear to be a sharp boundary between compounds and noun phrases, either in speaker's strategies for indicating stress, or in their perception of it. Indeed, there appears to be a continuum, where certain word pairs like “apple core” are definitely perceived and produced as compounds, others such as “boiling water” are usually noun phrases, and numerous others like “parcel post” or “box lunch” can be either. Durational and fundamental frequency data will be presented for three naive subjects who recorded 40 word pairs in sentence context. Additional subjects were given a written list of these sentences with the word pairs underlined and asked to circle the one syllable of each pair that should be most stressed. Certain classes of word pairs received more consistent stress assignments than others, but definite rules predicting stress seem to be difficult to formulate.