2025/06/16 by Carlos Gussenhoven, Tomas Riad · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Lexicography and Language Studies #Linguistic research and analysis #Phonetics and Phonology Research
paper · doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.966
openalex publication_date 2025/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/18
Abstract Word stress is a rhythm-inspired foot structure of major-class words. Germanic feet developed from stem-based trochees, which are headed by an initial heavy syllable. The complexity in the manifestation of a word’s foot structure decreases from English via Dutch and German to Scandinavian. This is first seen in the four-way contrast among disyllables in English, which may have two stressed syllables, with primary stress either on the first or last and secondary stress or no stress on the other syllable. Only a two-way contrast is available in Dutch, German, and peninsular Scandinavian, due to a ban on adjacent stressed syllables, while the initial stress of Icelandic (and Faroese) leaves only one prosodic pattern, excluding recent loans. English, Dutch, and German distinguish primary and secondary stresses, while Scandinavian admits only one stress per prosodic word. This prosodic complexity gradient is reflected in the pitch accent distribution at the word level, most noticeably reflected in the effects of the Rhythm Rule, which are frequent in English and absent in Scandinavian. Additional features whose distribution relates to stress are the stød in Danish and the tone contrasts in Franconian and peninsular Scandinavian. In all the languages except Icelandic and Faroese, foot structure is intimately involved in morphological formations, in unison with segmental effects. These are explained by affix subcategorizations and prosodic annotations, either as inherent properties of the affix (e.g., pre-accenting) or as requirements made by the affix on the base (e.g., posttonic), while affix orderings are explained by level-ordered lexical phonology. The difference between (primary and secondary) stressed syllables and unstressed syllables plays a central role in word detection in English language processing.