Neutral Stress and the Position of Heads

Abstract

The topic of this paper is neutral stress, i.e. stress in the absence of narrow focus. I will argue that on the basis of the theory of neutral stress outlined in Jacobs 1991a, certain asymmetries in the neutral stress patterns of different constructions and of different languages (e.g. English, German, and Hungarian) can be shown to reflect different settings of an independent parameter, viz. head position. Surprisingly, however, we do not have to refer to head position in the formulation of stress principles to account for this fact. Rather, the correlation between stress patterns and head position proves to be a mere epiphenomenon of the interaction between stress principles and syntactic structures in the theory mentioned above.

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