Chapter 8: Suprasegmental Phonology: Stress, Rhythm, Intonation

8.1. Stess and prominence. The phonemic (contrastive) function of stress

8.2. Free stress and fixed stress. The predictability of accentual patterns
8.3. Metric patterns
8.4. Morphological processes and stress shift
8.5. Primary and secondary stress
8.6. Weak and strong forms. Vowel reduction and delition
8.7. Rhythm
8.8. Intonational contours. Their pragmatic value

8.4. Morphological processes and stress shift

It can establish phonemic contrasts like those mentioned previously and, even
more, the shift of the stress triggers a change in the value of the vowels of the sequence.
This happens mostly during morphological processes such as affixation. Affixes are of
two categories: a) affixes that do not modify the accentual pattern of the base and affixes
that trigger stress shift in the base. Chomsky and Halle (1968: 66-67) distinguished
between word boundaries # that blocked the operation of phonological rules and
formative boundaries + that do not block phonological processes. Thus, the word fatal
[‘fewtcl] has the stress on the first syllable, which contains a diphthong, that is a tense
vowel having the duration of two skeletal slots (moras) on the timing tier. The second
syllable, which is not stressed, has a short, lax vowel – schwa. If we derive the word
fatality [fc’tælwtw] with the suffix ity, the stress shifts onto the second syllable and the
vowel in the first one becomes lax, is reduced to schwa and occupies just one slot on the
timing tier. The vowel of the second syllable, now under stress, gets a new phonetic
value, as it is no longer reduced to schwa. This is consistent with what we know about the
distribution of [c] which, we will remember, only occurs in unstressed syllables. This
means that the boundary between the suffix ity and the verb is a formative boundary +
and not a word boundary #.