 |
Preface
It has often been assumed that stress distribution
is stable throughout the history of the English
language. Though it was analyzed synchronically,
English stress tends to be left outside the
diacronic analisis. This work aims at attributing
English stress shift to be the reranking
of certain constraints within the hierarchy
of constraints on prosodic structure.
Generative phonology
has analyzed linguistic
stress into minute details
by postulating
a large set of stress rules,
leaving a considerable
amount of questions open.
One serious question
is concerned with the validity
of some rules.
Another involves the psychological
reality
of the serial derivation,
where rules are
applied to the underlying
representation,
until the required surface
structuｒe is
obtained. In Chapter 1,
we briefly review
the previous approaches
to English stress,
and point out that they
failed to refer to
the grammatical functions
of stress : demarcative
function and morphological
function.
In Optimality theory, the serial derivation
and phonological rules are replaced by the
constraint hierarchy, which evaluates a set
of output forms in a parallel fashion. In
Chapter 2, we introduce the guiding ideals
of Optimality Theory, and indicate that the
grammatical functions of stress are realized
by two different constraint families : Alignment
constraints and Identity constraints.
In Chapter 3, we find that stress shifted leftward in old English and
Middle English, rightward in Modern English, and it is currentrly shifting
rightward in certain polysyllabic words. we demonstrate that English stress
distribution is determined by the ranking of constraints, which are formalized
in the framework of Optimality Theory. Our claim is that English stress
shift is ascribed to the reranking of the Identity constraints within the
hierarchy of constraints on prosodic structure.
We conclude in Chapter 4 that the constraint reranking is limited to
the Identity constraints within the invariant hierarchy of the language.
The outranking of certain Alignment constraints over the Identity constraints
indicates that the demarcative function predominates over the loses the
information it had at the moment of begin borrowed or derived. |
|
|
|
