Stress: Phonotactic and Phonetic Evidence

Abstract

Stress can be signaled through a number of different acoustic properties, including increased duration, greater intensity, and higher fundamental frequency. Stress may also affect segmental and syllable structure. Typically, stressed syllables trigger qualitative fortition and/or lengthening, whereas unstressed syllables are associated with lenition and/or shortening. To take an example of a stress‐driven fortition process affecting syllable structure, Dutch (Booij 1995) inserts an intervocalic glottal stop as an onset to stressed vowels; epenthesis does not interrupt vowel sequences in which the second vowel is unstressed. We thus have pairs such as [ˈxa.ɔs] ‘chaos’ and [[a.ˈˀɔr.ta] ‘aorta’, in which the presence of glottal stop is predictable from stress. American English provides well‐described cases of lenition in unstressed syllables. For example, post‐vocalic coronal stops weaken to taps before unstressed syllabic sounds, e.g. /siti/ → [siɾi] ‘city’. Furthermore, most unstressed vowels reduce to schwa, e.g. ['kan,tεkst]context vs. [kən'tεkstʃuəl]contextual, or may delete in certain contexts delete, e.g. [ˈtmeiɾoʊ] ∼ [ˈtəmeitoʊ]tomato, [ˈksændɹə] ∼ [kəˈsændɹə]Cassandra.

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