English word-stress By Erik Fudge (review)

170LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 1 (1986) English word-stress. By Erik Fudge. London & Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984. Pp. xiii, 240. Cloth $22.95, paper $11.95. Reviewed by D. Robert Ladd, University ofEdinburgh The preface to EWS presents it as a work whose most important goal is pedagogical: a systematic introduction to the principles of word stress for the use ofteachers and students ofEnglish as a second language. In addition, Fudge says, the many appendices may make it useful 'to a wide range of readers' as a reference work, while the book's theoretical foundation should give it scholarly interest as well. How one evaluates EWS obviously depends to some extent on which of these aspects—theoretical contribution, pedagogical tool, or reference work—one sees as primary. In the course of this review, I shall say something about all three. The book is organized into seven chapters, each with exercises (a key is provided at the end of the book), a list of further reading—and, except for the two introductory chapters, long appendices that take up well over half the bulk of the book. Chap. 1, 'Introduction', presents a brief review of the literature, concentrating on Kingdon 1958, Chomsky & Halle 1968 (SPE), and Garde 1968, 1973. It also presents the system ofdiacritics used throughout the book to make clear the pronunciation of words cited in standard orthography. The system supplements stress markings with the macron, breve, and diéresis to indicate vowel quality in ambiguous cases. I was skeptical of the idea of such diacritics at first, but quickly found the system very easy to use. The fact that F is able to rely on such a minimal set of markings, while citing almost all the thousands of words in the appendices in standard orthography, lends credibility to the claim (often repeated since SPE) that there is not so much wrong with English spelling as used to be assumed. Chap. 2, 'Preliminaries', deals straightforwardly with the principles of dividing words into syllables and into morphemes, and describes how to remove all the affixes that have no effect on stress—those that are bounded by # in SPE—in order to arrive at the stressable portion (SP), and to proceed from there with the rules for stress assignment. Chap. 3, 'Stress in simple roots', describes how to assign stress in monomorphemic SP's. The analysis is based for the most part on SPE; however, F makes no distinction between nouns and verbs, for two reasons: first, because most of the noun/verb pairs that are distinguished by stress involve prefixes, and hence do not fall within the scope of this chapter, and second, because he is quite content to treat all final-stressed monomorphemic SP's, irrespective of part of speech, as listed exceptions. F's rule for secondary stress in monomorphemic SP's is essentially equivalent to the SPE Auxiliary Reduction Rule. Chap. 4, 'Suffixes and stress', is, with its appendices, much the longest in the book. Here F diverges from the SPE tradition and adopts the notion of 'accentual properties of morphemes'—implicit in Kingdon's work, and explicit in Garde's. That is, F treats the stress placement on a word with a suffix as a REVIEWS171 function of the suffix itself. Certain suffixes ('autostressed') take stress on themselves; others ('pre-stressed 2') place the stress two syllables before the suffix; others (the ones he has already stripped from the word in Chap. 2) are stress-neutral, and so on. One large group of suffixes is designated 'pre-stressed 1/2'; these, as F notes (42), assign stress 'by a principle similar to that for simple roots ending in a weak [i.e. light] syllable'. This strong parallelism between the rules for words with suffixes and words without them is of course the basis of SPE's rejection of the accentual-properties approach. It would have been useful if F had emphasized the general similarities more; conceding this point would not necessarily have contradicted his decision to analyse the system in terms of accentual properties. Pedagogical considerations alone may have dictated F's more concrete approach, not to mention the fact that there are some two dozen 'mixed suffixes' which...