The Secondary Stress in English : Constraints on Foot Formation

Abstract

Over the last few decades the non-uniformity of English secondary stress has been used as the basic phenomenon for establishing new arguments about how the phonology of English should be viewed. In particular, it has been argued that this non-uniformity presents crucial evidence for the parallelism in phonology represented by Optimality Theory. This paper sets out the problems that previous OT- based analyses encounter in explaining the non-uniformity of English secondary stress and presents a new OT- based analysis of foot-formation in the secondary stress of English. The analysis proposed in this paper is distinguished from previous analyses in the following two respects. First, in the proposed analysis the interaction between the syllable- based Ft- Bin and two alignment constraints Align- L(HeavySyll, FOOT) and Align- R(HeavySyll, FOOT) is crucial to determining optimal foot- forms for the regular patterns of secondary stress in English. Second, the lexical mark, which is specified for the elements that are unexpectedly stressed or unstressed, carries the lexical foot-information of exceptional elements.