Stress in compounds: An experimental research

Abstract

The paper deals with the role of stress in distinguishing between compounds and phrases. An experimental laboratory research aims (a) to examine the nature of stress in N + N constructions in terms of its relative value, i.e., in relation to the values measured in neighbouring syllables; (b) to compare precise laboratory data with expectations of native speakers; (c) to compare precise laboratory measurement data with those obtained from native speakers who listened to a recording read by native speakers, in order to find out whether human ear perception corresponds to the results produced by computer technology; (d) to compare the laboratory data with the structural predictions using Giegerich's criteria (2004); (e) to compare the laboratory data with the semantic predictions based on Olsen (2000). The laboratory data are analyzed and commented on with regard to the individual research tasks and objectives specified in points (a) to (e) above.

Acquisition of prosody: The role of variability

“…It is well-known that most English compounds differ from phrases in their stress patterns, with the former stressed on the first element and the latter on the final element (e.g., hot-dog = food vs. hot dog = hot canine). This refers to additional prominence since in both cases, each word has a primary stress manifested mainly by f0, duration and intensity [14,15,16].…”

Prominence in Triconstituent Compounds: Pitch Contours and Linguistic Theory

“…As the relation between prominence and pitch can be quantified, it offers an opportunity to test statistically whether different types of compounds are produced with different prominence patterns. Using acoustic data obtained from speech corpora and production experiments, this methodology has been employed in recent studies of NN compounds (Farnetani et al, 1988; Plag, 2006; Plag et al, 2008; Štekauer, Zimmermann, & Gregová, 2007) and NNN compounds (Kösling, 2011; Kösling & Plag, 2009). However, the way that pitch is measured in all of these studies suffers from an identical weakness, namely that the researchers looked at rather crude abstractions of the pitch contour in the investigated compounds.…”

“…However, the way that pitch is measured in all of these studies suffers from an identical weakness, namely that the researchers looked at rather crude abstractions of the pitch contour in the investigated compounds. For instance, Farnetani et al (1988) measure the peak pitch in each compound constituent, Plag (2006) measures pitch at the mid-point of the syllables with primary stress, while Štekauer et al (2007), Plag et al (2008), Kösling and Plag (2009) and Kösling (2013) measure pitch averages in each constituent. Any information not captured by these measurements is ignored in the analysis, which is why these measurements run the risk of ignoring potentially systematic variation in the pitch contour that may provide perceptually important cues to prominence.…”

“…Yet, all pitch measurements employed in the earlier literature on compound prominence are one-dimensional representations of the pitch contour in the sense that they describe only localized pitch events, and as such are incapable of registering any kind of pitch movement. 3 Furthermore, only parts of the pitch contour are considered in these studies, for instance the nucleus (Štekauer et al, 2007) or the rime (Plag et al, 2008) of the stressed syllables in each compound constituent. However, as Arvaniti et al (1998) have shown, the tonal targets of bitonal pitch accents are not always aligned with the accented syllable itself.…”