• HOME
  • Publications
  • BLOG
  • English Phonetics and Phonology
  • The English Pronouncing Dictionary
  • RESOURCES
  Peter Roach

Stress-shift

25/8/2015

0 Comments

 
I have been exchanging emails with a professor from Slovakia on the subject of stress-shift in English. I had a look at Wikipedia to see what the received wisdom was on the subject and found that there is no WP article. This is quite surprising – I tend to think of this as an interesting self-contained topic, the sort of thing you might set as a student essay topic. If you type ‘stress-shift’ into WP, you get offered a lot of articles on specific languages where stress-shift is believed to occur, but the first article to come up with anything related to English phonology comes way down the list, in Metrical Phonology. Metrical Phonology has, I suppose, made more of stress-shift than any other branch of phonetics and phonology, but I don’t think it has exclusive rights to the topic.

The article, when it gets on to this topic in the ‘Metrical grids’ section, says that “... stress shifts to avoid a 'stress clash'. A stress clash can occur when two stressed syllables are too close to each other”. I feel very suspicious about this sort of post-hoc reasoning – what does “too close” mean here?. Speakers are perfectly capable of producing strongly stressed syllables next to each other, without feeling that a “clash” is going on – for example, “We had a hard-nosed team-talk at half-time” seems perfectly easy to say. It’s a bit like the explanations for coarticulation that tell us that we tend to assimilate sounds to be more like their neighbours so that they are easier to say, ignoring the fact that these “difficult” sound combinations may be managed perfectly well by speakers of other languages.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

    uArchives

    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    March 2019
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    July 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.