Compound stress, informativity and analogy

Ingo Plag (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Compound stress, informativity and analogy

After an introduction to the major theme of the seminar we turn to two studies in which we have investigated the variability of compound stress assignment in English. Based on the analysis of thousands of compounds it is shown that compound stress is best accounted for by models in which stress is assigned based on distributional properties of lexical items in the lexicon instead of by categorical rules.