Weight and final vowels in the English stress system

Abstract

This paper presents both dictionary evidence and experimental evidence that the quality of a word's final vowel plays a role in assigning main stress in English. Specifically, a final [i] pushes main stress leftwards – three-syllable words ending with [i] have a strong tendency to take antepenultimate stress. This pattern is compared with the Latin Stress Rule for English, according to which words with heavy penultimate syllables should have penultimate stress. Both pressures are shown to be productive in experiments. Two analyses of the final-[i] generalisation are tested, one using the ‘cloned’ constraint Non-finFt[i], and one using the ‘parochial’ constraint Antepenult[i], which directly penalises [i]-final words which do not have antepenultimate stress. Although it is has less typological support, Antepenult[i] is argued for on the grounds that it correctly predicts participants' behaviour on words with both a heavy penult and a final [i], which are extremely rare in the lexicon.