Weight scales for stress

Abstract

Stress placement in words is often affected by syllable weight, stress being attracted to heavy syllables. Weight in such cases is usually binary (heavy vs. light) but often instantiates more complex scales. This chapter focuses especially on the phonological analysis of ternary and higher order scales, featuring case studies of several languages set in Optimality Theory. It argues that such scales must be analyzed in terms of vowel prominence rather than moraic coercion or coda prominence. The relation of geminates to stress also features prominently, as it is maintained that geminates can be analyzed as uniformly moraic for stress. Finally, several cases of gradient weight for stress are surveyed, including English. In these systems, stress placement responds statistically to weight, which manifests a fine-grained continuum rather than a simple categorical opposition and often includes onset and sonority effects.