ENGLISH STRESS AND UNDERLYING REPRESENTATIONS

International audienceThis paper addresses the issue of underlying representations (URs) from a Guierrian perspective and the necessity of taking into account certain orthographic elements which are associated with phonological behaviours related to English stress. We propose that underlying vowels should be represented as abstract phonological objects and that the inclusion of orthographic consonant geminates and final mute into URs should be considered. Additionally, we argue that the phonology should have access to morphosyntactic information, which implies that the input to the phonology should be polystratal. Eventually, after arguing that vowel reduction should occur after stress assignment, we will report the results of studies on vowel reduction and " stress preservation " showing that reduction is not systematic in unstressed syllables and that non-reduction can, in some cases, be attributed to the existence of a full vowel in a morphologically-related word or to a high frequency of the latter