The presence and absence of stress on penultimate light syllables is one of the most recalcitrant problems to deal with in English stress assignment. Previous proposals have suggested lexicon division and different rankings in the subdivision(Pater, 1994; Kager, 1989; among others) or double consonant moraicity and low vowel mora generation along with no neutralization convention(cf. Rice, 1996). Still, light penult stress remains partly unexplained. This paper reviews these previous proposals, pointing out problems in the analyses and views the penult stress from a different angle with two main constraints, Align-PrWd and NonHead(ə). The ranking, NonHead(ə) » Align-PrWd, accounts for the position of a light penult syllable in a foot, explaining its variability in stress