Frequency and stress preservation : Encoding Frequency in OT

Abstract

This paper attempts to show frequency effect on English word stress with corpus-based study, and to incorporate frequency into Optimality Theoretic grammar. I propose the constraint ID-Stress (f≤t) and the hierarchy ID-Stress (f≤t) >> *Clash-Head >> ID-Stress. Even though frequency alone is not the absolute factor in stress assignment in that other factors such as morpheme-specificity are also influential, it is clearly an interesting aspect in English stress phenomena.