geekery resumes

[fox]

observe, please, the Main Stress Rule (proposed by Chomsky and Halle 1968 in The Sound Pattern of English, just so you know what we're dealing with here:

                         {      [-tense ]      [αvoc  ] }
                         {C₀    [       ]   C₀¹ [αcons ] } (i)
                         {      [   V   ]      [-ant  ]₀}
V → [1 stress] / [X----- {                              }
                          {C₀                           } (ii)


                         {    [-tense ]      }
                         {+C₀ [       ] C₀]_NA } (a)
                         {    [   V   ]      }
               /-----    {    [-tense ]      }
                         {    [       ] C₀]_N } (b)
                         {    [   V   ]      }
                         {    ]              } (e)


and now here's what i've got to say by way of explanation:

The Main Stress Rule is a doubly applied rule -- the stress is applied to a vowel in a particular environment if that environment occurs in a particular environment -- and disjunctive, so that in fact conditions (ii) and (e) represent 'elsewhere' in each case.  So there are six possible conditions on the environment for the application of main stress; in (i)(a), the vowel takes primary stress if it is followed by a syllable consisting of, at minimum, a lax vowel, this vowel being optionally preceded by some number of consonants and followed by at most one consonant and an optional glide or liquid other than /l/ (i), provided that syllable is followed (after a morpheme boundary) by a single-syllable suffix with a lax vowel, in which the onset and coda are optional, and that the suffix is followed by a word boundary, and that the word is a noun or an adjective.

And so on for (i)(b), (i)(e), (ii)(a), (ii)(b), and (ii)(e) ('elsewhere', the simplest of the lot, in which a vowel takes primary stress if it is the final vowel in a verb).

good grief.

ETA: okay.  here goes.

V → [1 stress] / means, the Verb (V) becomes (→) primary-stressed ([1 stress] -- it takes the main accent in a word -- in the environment (/) about to be described.  everything that follows that first / is the environment; the things stacked up on top of each other in curly brackets are different possibilities that will yield the same result.

so, X----- means anything (x) can precede the Verb in question (-----), and all the stuff in the curly brackets is what could follow it in order to make it take the primary stress.  there are two choices:

(1) a syllable, C₀VC₀¹C_liquid, which may begin with one or more consonants, or with no consonant at all (the subscript 0 means 'at least zero'), must have a lax (non-tense) vowel (and the question of what makes a vowel tense or lax is not worth getting into here, trust me, and i'm saying that in comparison to all of this, which is), and may end with another consonant or consonant cluster, which has its own requirements -- the subscript 0 still means 'at least zero', and the superscript 1 means 'no more than one', so there can be at most one ordinary consonant following the vowel, and then after that there can be any number of glides or liquids other than L, so, Y, W, or R.

(2) some number of consonants. or not.

what this means is that if a vowel is followed by the kind of syllable described in (1), or if it is followed just by consonants but not by any more syllables, i.e. it it's the final vowel, it will be the stressed vowel in its word. if it's not the final vowel but it's followed by any kind of syllable that doesn't meet the criteria in (1), it will not be stressed.

which is just the beginning.

Comments

[gail-b.livejournal.com]

Huh?

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

I could probably understand this, if it were written in English instead of Linguist.

[emrinalexander.livejournal.com]

I think the rule is stress-inducing enough, in and of itself *G*.

[corvidae9.livejournal.com]

woooooow. :P *runs back to her database to feel smart again* ;))