Tone- and Sonority-driven Stress

Almost all work on word stress focuses on edges, weight, and rhythm.  However, a small body of work has looked at other influences on stress including structural elements (e.g. onsets, codas, and so on), tone, and sonority levels. 

My interest in both tone-/sonority-driven stress has generally not been for its own sake, but rather for the insight it gives into the formal expression of markedness.

My views on tone- and sonority-driven stress fall into two ‘eras’.

Era 1: Acceptance

At first, I accepted that sonority and tone could influence stress. Here’s a summary of this work:

de Lacy, Paul (2007). The interaction of tone, sonority, and prosodic structure. In Paul de Lacy (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (1st edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch.12 (pp. 281-307).

For more details on tone, see:

de Lacy, Paul (2002). The interaction of tone and stress in Optimality Theory. Phonology 19.1: 1-32.

For details on my sonority theories, see:

de Lacy, Paul (2004). Markedness conflation in Optimality Theory. Phonology 21.2:145-199.

And there’s a lot more in the early part of my doctoral dissertation:

de Lacy, Paul (2002).  The formal expression of markedness.  PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.  ROA 542.
• Analyses of a variety of sonority-driven stress systems (chs.3,4). 

And some in my 2006 book:

de Lacy, Paul (2006). Markedness: Reduction and Preservation in Phonology.  Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 112.  Cambridge University Press. 
• Ch.7 examines the influence of sonority-foot constraints on vowel reduction and stress placement.  Provides a detailed analysis of Gujarati sonority-driven stress.

Era 2: Uncertainty~Skepticism

My PhD students Eileen Blum, Chris Oakden, Vartan Haghverdi, and Shu-hao Shih started to look closely at sonority- and tone-driven stress in the early 2010s. Their findings changed my opinion about whether we are sure that tone- and sonority-driven systems exist. You can read a summary of that skepticism here:

Shih, Shu-hao and Paul de Lacy (2020). Does Sonority-driven stress exist? Catalan Journal of Linguistics 18: 9-40 [PDF] (https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/catjl.25)

Alternatively, you could watch a video:

Shih & de Lacy (2002). How we know what we don’t know.

Or you could read Shu-hao Shih’s dissertation, which is mostly about sonority-driven stress:

Shih, Shu-hao (2018). Non-moraic schwa: phonology and phonetics. PhD dissertation, Rutgers.

There’s also a forthcoming book where you will be able to read about everyone’s contributions:

Blum, Eileen, Chris Oakden, Paul de Lacy, and Shu-hao Shih (forthcoming) Non-metrical stress.