Phonological word stress can roughly be described as the relative prominence of certain ‘elements’ in a word relative to others. I use the somewhat vague term ‘element’ here to indicate that even at the most basic level, defining stress can be surprisingly complicated: Is stress a property of syllables, segments (vowels, or possibly even consonants?), units between the syllables and the segment (moras, x-slots), or can languages differ in this regard?

In this course, we discuss some of the central questions that have been asked about the phonetics and phonology of stress and review some of the answers that have been given. In doing so, we cover distributional properties of main stress (the most prominent syllable in a word) and rhythm (the alternation between strong and weak beats throughout words found in some languages with stress), as well as a selection of theoretical approaches to these questions.

At the end of the course, students should be able to…

• describe widely cited main phonetic correlates of stress, and assess to what degree these correlates capture variation attested across languages;
• describe basic generalizations about cross-linguistic properties of stress and rhythm;
• evaluate different theories that have been proposed to formally analyze main stress;
• discuss how different approaches to main stress capture the analysis of rhythm: e.g., should main stress and rhythm be analyzed with the same machinery, or should they be regarded as different from each other?
• conduct basic phonological analyses of stress systems in different approaches.

Selected references
Andersson, Samuel. 2021. Abkhaz Stress as a Segmental Property. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 27(1):1–10.

de Lacy, Paul. 2002. The interaction of tone and stress in Optimality Theory. Phonology 19: 1–32.

Faust, Noam & Shanti J. Ulfsbjorninn. The three degrees of metrical strength in Strict CV metrics, a theory without parsing. Journal of Linguistics 61.4 (2025): 723-745.

Faust, Noam & Shanti J. Ulfsbjorninn. The typology of weight in strict CV metrics: A challenge to moraic theory. Linguistic Inquiry (2025): 1-43.

Gussenhoven, Carlos, & Haike Jacobs (2011, 2017, or 2024). Understanding Phonology (3rd, 4th or 5th ed.). Routledge. (Chapters “Between the segment and the syllable”, “Word stress”)

Hayes, Bruce. 1989. Compensatory lengthening in moraic phonology.” Linguistic inquiry 20.2: 253-306.

Hayes, Bruce. 1995. Metrical stress theory: Principles and case studies. University of Chicago press.

Van Der Hulst, Harry. 2012. Deconstructing stress. Lingua 122.13: 1494-1521.