<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Nuclear stress (or sentence stress) as a prosodic feature marks information flow in spoken English, and has received some treatment in the linguistics literature, most notably in pragmatics, but less so in newer phonological paradigms. Current theories in linguistics might shed light on this feature, such as Optimality Theory (OT) and cognitive grammar (CG). This paper compares potential insights and likely predictions of these two approaches for nuclear stress, by examining a recorded conversation of native US English speakers. The descriptive statistics indicate stress pattern distributions as expected, and some stress tokens show particular pragmatic and discourse functions of nuclear stress. The OT framework can better explain the interaction of different levels of prosody, grammar, and information structure, while CG might offer a more holistic explanation of stress, and its sociopragmatic and discourse functions, and may thus be likely more applicable to discourse studies, applied linguistics, and pedagogy. Implications are discussed for a CG theory of prosodic phonology, and for L2 pedagogy.</p>
</abstract>

Nuclear stress (or sentence stress) as a prosodic feature marks information flow in spoken English, and has received some treatment in the linguistics literature, most notably in pragmatics, but less so in newer phonological paradigms. Current theories in linguistics might shed light on this feature, such as Optimality Theory (OT) and cognitive grammar (CG). This paper compares potential insights and likely predictions of these two approaches for nuclear stress, by examining a recorded conversation of native US English speakers. The descriptive statistics indicate stress pattern distributions as expected, and some stress tokens show particular pragmatic and discourse functions of nuclear stress. The OT framework can better explain the interaction of different levels of prosody, grammar, and information structure, while CG might offer a more holistic explanation of stress, and its sociopragmatic and discourse functions, and may thus be likely more applicable to discourse studies, applied linguistics, and pedagogy. Implications are discussed for a CG theory of prosodic phonology, and for L2 pedagogy.

A comparative analysis of English nuclear stress principles in conversation

Topics in Linguistics

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

{"article-title":"A comparative analysis of English nuclear stress principles in conversation"}

Nuclear stress (or sentence stress) as a prosodic feature marks information flow in spoken English, and has received some treatment in the linguistics...

A comparative analysis of English nuclear stress principles in conversation

Published Online: Jun 28, 2023

Page range: 18 - 42

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2023-0002

Keywords
sentence stress, nuclear stress, Optimality Theory, cognitive grammar, phonology, pragmatics, discourse analysis

© 2023 Kent Lee, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A comparative analysis of English nuclear stress principles in conversation

Published Online: Jun 28, 2023

Page range: 18 - 42

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2023-0002

Keywordssentence stress, nuclear stress, Optimality Theory, cognitive grammar, phonology, pragmatics, discourse analysis

© 2023 Kent Lee, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
sentence stress, nuclear stress, Optimality Theory, cognitive grammar, phonology, pragmatics, discourse analysis