Testing for Frequency and Structural Effects in an English Stress Shift

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:This paper considers the English diatonic stress shift (DSS). We examine the role of frequency and phonological structure as conditioning factors for which of a set of noun/verb pairs have undergone the DSS between 1700 and the present. Previous work by Phillips (1984) has shown a role of frequency: on average, words which have undergone the DSS have lower frequency than those which have not. Using a new dataset, we show via multiple logistic regression that there is a significant effect of frequency in the direction shown by Phillips, as well as effects of phonological structure; for example, a closed initial syllable makes change more likely. There is also a strong interaction between the effects of frequency and structure; in particular, structure modulates the strength and direction of the frequency effect. Our use of multiple regression follows its widespread use in sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov 1994) for quantifying the relative effects of different conditioning factors in cases of language change