volume: 8 (2008)
author: Attila Starčević
title: Old English stress — from constituency to dependency
abstract: The issue of OE stress hinges crucially on the following assumptions: is it solely morphologically determined (as argued by Suphi 1985, 1988, Minkova & Stockwell 1994, etc.), or is it phonologically grounded (as claimed by e.g. Halle & Keyser 1971, Lass 1983, 1985, McCully & Hogg 1990, etc.), or is it a mixture of the two (e.g. Moon 1996, Bermúdez-Otero 1996, McCully 1999a, b)? Some accounts (e.g. Kim 2001) argue for quantity-insensitive primary stress and quality-sensitive secondary stress. The article looks at some of the problems posed by these analyses and proposes a new one couched in the framework of a radically simplified skeleton comprised of strictly alternating CV units (Lowenstamm 1996). It is suggested on the basis of process such as High-Vowel Deletion that Old English was dominated by a template the size of two CV units over which a number of phonological processes are played out, including the assignment of secondary stress. The attempt is to show that OE stress can also be captured in a framework that does away with (vertical) constituency and espouses lateral (horizontal) dependency between CV units.
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