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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 10:3 (2020) ► pp.452–486

Stress in real time

The noun–verb stress contrast and the rhythmic context hypothesis in the history of English

| Universität Wien

This contribution reviews a series of studies by Kelly (and Bock), suggesting that stress preferences of English nouns and verbs for left-hand and right-hand stress patterns are partly a result of alternating rhythm in real utterances. This claim is tested on diachronic corpus data to verify its historical implications. By using verse evidence to calibrate stress values for historical word classes, the quantitative analysis confirms that distributional asymmetries regarding strong and weak syllables in the contexts of nouns and verbs have existed at least since Late Middle English. In addition, the claim that stem-final segments predict the likelihood of right-hand stress is not only confirmed but the effect is found to be independent of etymological origin.

Keywords: stress contrast, rhythmic alternation, Middle English, Early Modern English, statistical analysis, diachronic analysis, verse evidence, usage-based linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The noun–verb stress difference in English
    • 2.1Pervasiveness of the noun–verb stress difference in the English lexicon
    • 2.2Linguistic interpretations of the noun–verb stress difference
    • 2.3The rhythmic context hypothesis
  • 3.An empirical study in three phases
    • 3.1Stress in Time revisited: Noun and verb stems in their utterance level contexts
      • 3.1.1Data and methods
      • 3.1.2Results
    • 3.2Noun and verb stems in their word level contexts
      • 3.2.1Data and method
      • 3.2.2Results
    • 3.3Final consonants as a predictor of iambic stress
      • 3.3.1Data and method
      • 3.3.2Results
  • 4.General discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19030.hof
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