Compound stress in English: Modelling the prosody of NN and NNN constructions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ingo Plag
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2005 to 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5447327

• Final Report Year: 2011

Final Report Abstract

It is generally assumed that compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. bláckboard, wátchmaker). However, there is a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. apricot crúmble, Penny Láne, Tory léader) that is unaccounted for in the literature. In the first phase of the project we tested three existing hypotheses against large amounts of different kinds of data (from speech corpora, dictionaries and experiments). The hypotheses tested make reference to argument structure, semantics and analogy as predictors of compound stress. It turned out that, although making correct predictions for parts of the data, none of the structural and semantic mechanisms proposed in the literature works in a categorical fashion, and that probabilistic and analogical models are more successful in their predictions than traditional rule-based ones. These results were robust, no matter which kinds of data we used for testing. In the second phase of the project we investigated in more detail some underexplored sources of stress variability of compounds, and we implemented new exemplar-based computational models, testing novel hypotheses about compound stress assignment that we developed on the basis of our previous results. Furthermore, we extend our research to compounds with three constituents (e.g. seat belt law), for which hardly any systematic empirical studies are available. Overall, the project has contributed significantly to a much better understanding of compound stress assignment in English, and has done so in three respects, covering both empirical and theoretical ground:  The determining factors have been identified through large-scale empirical verification (or falsification) and their effect sizes have been measured.  The phonetic properties and the phonological nature of compound stress have been identified and clarified.  Compound stress assignment has been shown to be a process that emerges from the lexicon and is not governed by deterministic rules.

Publications

• 2008. The role of semantics, argument structure, and lexicalisation in compound stress assignment in English. Language 84(4). 760-794
  Plag, Ingo, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe & Maria Braun
  
• 2009. Does branching direction determine prominence assignment? An empirical investigation of triconstituent compounds in English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 5(2). 201-239
  Kösling, Kristina & Ingo Plag
  
• 2010. Compound stress assignment by analogy: The constituent family bias. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 29(2). 243-282
  Plag, Ingo
  
• 2010. Constituent family size and compound stress assignment in English. Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 17. 349-382
  Plag, Ingo & Gero Kunter
  
• 2010. Perception of prominence patterns in English nominal compounds. Speech Prosody 2010. 102007: 1-4
  Kunter, Gero
  
• 2011. Compound stress in English. The phonetics and phonology of prosodic prominence. Berlin: De Gruyter
  Kunter, Gero
  
• 2011. The phonetics of primary and secondary stress in North American English. Journal of Phonetics 39, 362-374
  Plag, Ingo, Gero Kunter & Mareile Schramm
  
• 2011. Towards an exemplar-based model of English compound stress. Journal of Linguistics
  Arndt-Lappe, Sabine
  
• 2012. Prominence in triconstituent compounds. Dissertation, Universität Siegen 2012
  Kösling, Kristina