Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints

Abstract

chusetts, Amherst for help and discussion. I would like to particularly acknowledge Bruce Hayes and Michael Kenstowicz for very detailed and useful comments on the manuscript, as well as Glyne Piggott for his encouragement and discussion of many previous versions of this analysis. This research was supported by SSHRCC fellowship 752-93-2773, and by SSHRCC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful. Non-uniformity in English secondary stress 239 non-uniformity, that is, explained why stress is consistently preserved in one context (1a), never preserved in another (1b) and variably preserved in yet another (2). As Prince (1993) and many others have shown, phonologically conditioned non-uniformity is an expected consequence of the ranked and minimally violable constraints of Optimality Theory, and is thus captured more straightforwardly than in theories that do not allow for constraint violability (see especially McCarthy & Prince 1993a, 1994a, Prince & Smolensky 1993 and McCarthy 2000). In Optimality Theory, a constraint is violated in a particular environment because its satisfaction would conflict with the requirements of a higher-ranked constraint. If in another context the higher-ranked constraint makes no conflicting demands, the lower-ranked one is obeyed. In frameworks that do not allow for violability, non-uniformity is handled in a variety of ways, but accounting for it usually requires a loss of generality in the formulation of constraints or rules. 3 Given the ease with which Optimality Theory generally deals with nonuniform constraint application, it is perhaps not too surprising that constraint ranking would help to provide insight into the complexities of the English secondary stress system. 4 §1 of this paper employs ranked constraints to account for the regular patterns of pretonic stress, in which syllable weight non-uniformly determines the distribution of secondary stress. The analysis of stem stress preservation and monomorphemic exceptions in §2 incorporates prosodic faithfulness constraints into the hierarchy established in §1. The result is an account that relies largely on independently motivated constraints and rankings to explain the nonuniform distribution of stem-based stress and of underlyingly specified exceptional stress. Lexically conditioned non-uniformity requires elaboration of the basic theory of Prince & Smolensky (1993), which provides no means of relativising the activity of a constraint to a particular set of lexical items. To handle the lexical idiosyncrasy of stem stress preservation, I propose in §2.4 that prosodic faithfulness constraints can be multiply instantiated in the constraint hierarchy : in a general version and in a lexically indexed version. This allows stress preservation to optionally overcome some, but not all, constraints. The resulting analysis captures the non-uniformity of stress preservation outlined above. This approach to lexical non-unisyllables, words of this type vary as to whether the rhotic of the stem is preserved or not. Assuming that ...

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