Earticle

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

The goal of this paper is to reexamine the proper applications of NONFINALITY constraints, in particular, NONFINALITY() constraint and NONFINALITY (FT) constraint within Optimality Theory (OT). To properly describe the prosodic status of final syllables in languages with trochaic systems like Latin and English, we propose that the foot-leveled NONFINALITY(FT) constraint be replaced with a new NONFINALITY(σweak-in-foot) constraint regulating the foot membership of word-final syllables. Although NONFINALITY(FT) constraint is for antepenultimate stress patterns in more than 3-syllabled words, it fails to account for the stress patterns of 2-syllabled words in size because they are undersized for the constraint application. With the ranked NONFINALITY() constraint and NONFINALITY(σweak-in-foot) constraint interaction, we can capture and describe both of the avoided prosodic structures, word-final stressed syllables and weak-footed syllables word-finally. NONFINALITY(FT) constraint still survives to reduplicate the effects of Foot Extrametricality within constraint-based approaches.

In this paper, I argue that consonant extrametricality or weight asymmetry be a direct result from the constraint interaction ranked as Weight-to-Stress >> Weight-by-Position and that NonFinality force a weight asymmetry between non-word-final and word-final positions. An analysis in terms of violable constraints can do without the device of consonant extrametricaltiy for stress purposes. In addition, I contend that the constraint-based approach outperforms previous extrametricality-based analyses by demonstrating that the former can capture a linguistic variation of weight asymmetry. It is attributable to constraint interplay between constraint groups that refer to weight asymmetry and others that define syllable types of languages.

The notion of extrametricality is significant in English stress theory. Extrametricality was developed to account for situations where peripheral elements of a phonological constituent are disregarded when establishing where a given rule is applicable at the edges of a constituent. The purpose of this paper is to consider the rise and fall of the notion of extrametricality in English stress theory. Since the notion was first introduced by Liberman and Prince(1977), it has had explanatory value in capturing insights about the English stress system in the treatment of word final syllables in quantity-sensitive languages. However, with the introduction of Optimality Theory, the notion has rarely been used, and instead a nonfinality constraint has been used in most articles. In chapter II, we discuss rule-based extrametricality by Hayes(1982) and Burzio(1995). In chapter III, nonfinality not using extrametricality is discussed on the constraint-based theory. Conclusion is given in chapter IV.