English Rhythmic Adjustment as Results of Constraint Interaction

Abstract

This paper tries to reanalyze English rhythmic adjustment under the constraint-based theory(Prince and Smolensky 1993). It is argued, first, that more specific prohibitions against two adjacent stressed syllables, *Clash-Head(PrWd) constraint and *Clash-Head(PhP) constraint, trigger the rhythmic adjustment on the phrase level as well as the stress assignment on the word level, which accounts for the evasive phrasal stress adjustment and further, captures the parallelism among prosodic levels. Second, it is claimed that the initial prominence of phonological phrases is due to low-ranking Align-Left constraint. It can be seen as a case of emergence of unmarkedness because lower-ranking Align-Left constraint can decide candidates when it ties on all higher-ranked constraint, and as a result early prominence emerges, that is unmarked with respect to the alignment constraint. As such, this study gives a selective support to the clash-based theory and the edge-based theory each.