An essay on stress By Morris Halle and Jean-Roger Vergnaud (review)

REVIEWS159 Keating, Patricia. 1988. The phonetics-phonology interface. Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, vol. I, Linguistic theory: Foundations, ed. by Frederick J. Newmeyer , 281-302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sagey, Elizabeth. 1986. The representation of features and relations in nonlinear phonology . Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics[Received 12 July 1991.] Morrill Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-4701 An essay on stress. By Morris Halle and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. xiii, 300. Reviewed by Juliette Blevins, The University of Texas at Austin An essay on stress (ES) presents a universal theory characterizing stress patterns of the world's languages. This theory is a synthesis and elaboration of metrical tree- and grid-based approaches to stress assignment: in H&V's 'constituentized grid' the fundamental status of metrical constituents is recognized without giving up the ease with which metrical transformations are carried out on the metrical grid. ES assumes familiarity with arguments for metrical theories of stress (e.g. Liberman & Prince 1977, Hayes 1981, Prince 1983) and proceeds to investigate further the precise nature of metrical rules and representations. Given this starting point, it is most accessible to specialists in the field. For the nonspecialist, it might be recommended for an overview of stress typology, or as a compendium of facts which determine the empirical basis of most current metrical innovations. The book is divided into three parts. The first provides introduction, background , and motivation for the constituentized grid, the second details formal aspects of the theory, and the third presents case studies of seven languages with fairly complex stress systems—Odawa, Lithuanian, Chamorro, Lenakel, Yidiny, Pirahä, and (with an entire chapter to itself) English. In Ch. 1 H&V outline general properties of stress systems that they believe any theory of stress must account for adequately, and they go on to illustrate how some of these are captured by means of the mixed grid-tree formalism. A unique aspect of this model is the stress plane. H&V assert that the stress plane, unlike the metrical trees of Liberman & Prince 1977 and Hayes 1981, is 'an independent entity with an autonomous status in the representation of the string' (6).' It is on the stress plane that metrical constituent structure and all metrical operations are defined. Within the stress plane, stressed elements are characterized as heads of delimited constituents. Properties of constituents on the stress plane are determined by setting a fixed number of parameters. Two of these are direct descendants of tree-based theories: the binary vs. un1 This is the notion of projection, first proposed in H&V 1978, in terms of which feature locality is derived by projecting like features onto their own independent autosegmental tiers. 160LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) bounded parameter ([ + bounded]) and the right-dominant vs. left-dominant parameter . The third parameter, referred to as [ + head terminal] is introduced solely for the purpose of generating amphibrachs ([wsw] feet); it determines whether or not the head of the constituent is adjacent to one of the constituent boundaries. Extrametricality is also carried over from earlier metrical accounts. Oddly enough, H&V's arguments for metrical constituents are equivocal, and are limited in kind to cases where constituency predicts the direction of stress shift under deletion or insertion of stress-bearing units. While the claims concerning stress shift in Russian, Sanskrit, and Winnebago are of interest, motivation of metrical constituency is certainly warranted by other rule types. For instance, McCarthy & Prince (1986, 1988, 1990) argue that it is the metrical foot which is reduplicated in numerous languages, including Diyari, Yidiny and Manam. In addition to the parameters outlined above, a number of universal conditions are proposed. The Recoverability Condition (10) states that '... the location of the metrical constituent boundaries must be unambiguously recoverable from the location of the heads, and conversely the location of the heads must be recoverable from that of the boundaries.' This condition is meant to limit stress systems in two ways. First, it disallows medially headed unbounded constituents. Second, it is claimed to account for one aspect of the Cayuvava ternary stress pattern: in words of3n + 2 stress-bearing units (SBUs), there is no stress on the initial SBU.2 The Exhaustivity Condition (EC) demands that...