Stress-shift

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.