A Noncyclic Analysis of English Word Stress

Most theories of stress have accounted for the basic stress patterns of English by a combination of stress and destressing rules. As Kiparsky (1979) points out, Liberman and Prince's (L&P) (1977) stress rules assign metrical structure in the following four main steps: Assign [+/- stress] Assign "feet: Connect remaining nodes Label right branches iff they are branaching (at the relevant level) In the present study, however, we give some arguments in favour of a noncyclic application of English word stress rules within the framework of a level-ordered morphology. We deal exclusively with English derivational processes and argue (i) that level I morphology is the domain of word stress and destressing rules and (ii) that these rules apply in a noncyclic fashion, i.e., all level I affixation is done in one step before the stress and destressing rules apply. .This paper is copyrighted, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) - see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0