Dimensions of Phonological Stress

Description

Stress and accent are central, organizing features of grammar, but their precise nature continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. These issues come to the forefront in acquisition, where the tension between the abstract mental representations and the concrete physical manifestations of stress and accent is deeply reflected. Understanding the nature of the representations of stress and accent patterns, and understanding how stress and accent patterns are learned, informs all aspects of linguistic theory and language acquisition. These two themes - representation and acquisition - form the organizational backbone of this book. Each is addressed along different dimensions of stress and accent, including the position of an accent or stress within various prosodic domains and the acoustic dimensions along which the pronunciation of stress and accent may vary. The research presented in the book is multidisciplinary, encompassing theoretical linguistics, speech science, and computational and experimental research.

Jeffrey Heinz (Ph.D. 2007, University of California, Los Angeles) is an associate professor at the University of Delaware. He conducts research at the intersection of theoretical linguistics, theoretical computer science, and computational learning theory. With Rob Goedemans and Harry van der Hulst, he helped develop the StressTyp2 database, which organizes and presents information on the stress and accent patterns in hundreds of languages around the world. Rob Goedemans (Ph.D. 1998, Universiteit Leiden) conducts research regarding the phonetics, phonology, and typology of stress in the languages of the world in general, and the languages of Aboriginal Australia and Indonesia in particular. Together with Harry van der Hulst, he has worked on several publications based on the StressTyp database, with which he has been involved since its inception. Currently, Rob is employed in the Departments of Communications and Information Management at the Humanities Faculty of Universiteit Leiden. Harry van der Hulst (Ph.D. 1984, Universiteit Leiden) specializes in phonology, which is the study of the sounds systems of languages, as well as the visual aspects of sign languages. He has published twenty-five books and over 130 articles. He has held (guest) positions at Universiteit Leiden, Universitat Salzburg, the University of Girona, Skidmore College, New York, New York University, and Cornell University, New York. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the international linguistic journal The Linguistic Review since 1990. He is currently (since 2000) Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.