The pronunciation of vowels with secondary stress in English

Abstract

There are few studies which have focused on the pronunciation of vowels with secondary stress in English. Within the framework introduced by Guierre (1979), this paper offers a large empirical study of these vowels and focuses on three key categories of words: non-derived words, constructions containing a semantically transparent prefix and suffixal derivatives. Overall, previous analyses based on rank, phonological domains and derivational isomorphism are confirmed but certain phenomena unveiled by this study require a few revisions of existing models. Several possible formalisation options are proposed to implement these revisions. The most promising seems to be the (here, exploratory) analysis using feet because it could considerably broaden the empirical coverage of the theory.

Keywords

• phonology
• English
• graphophonemics
• secondary stress
• reading grammar