ABSTRACT
The Stress of Non-Lexical Items in English
Chapter I
Generative descriptions of phrase stress in English have tra
ditionally been concerned only with the levels of stress on the
lexical category items, i.e., nouns, verbs, and adjectives,
appearing within larger syntactic units. But recent papers (by
King (1970), Baker (1971), Lakoff ( 1970), Zwicky ( 1970) , Bresnan
(1971b), Fiengo (1971), and Brame and Baker (1972)) have dis
cussed phenomena which are related to the stress of non-lexical
items. They have brought to light many facts which have long
lain dormant in dusty volumes by phoneticians, as well as new
facts which only a generative approach to language could reveal
as important. These extremely interesting discussions have made
clear the need for a comprehensive understanding of the processes
of stress reduction in non-lexical category items in English.
