Nuclear stress rule

[mutecornett]

Hey, linguists, could any of you explain the Nuclear Stress Rule to me? I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it because I'm really not familiar with the Chomskyan side of the field. (I'm all sociolinguistics and discourse analysis here, so I would super appreciate any help.)

Hahaha, I have totally been abusing my fandom journal for linguistics lately, but I have only one linguist friend on my regular journal and I already asked her. She doesn't get it either.

Comments

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

i was only a linguistics major for a semester and a half, unfortunately, but i have several linguists on my flist - trochee and kirinqueen are both grad students and very nice people and i'm sure either would be happy to help. troke is currently at a conference, so he may not be able to answer on short notice. i think kirinqueen is pretty good with the chomskyan stuff, and i think she is around and online often. have you tried asking at linguists? they look pretty friendly, and responsive.

sorry to have more advice than answer. :/

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

No, it is EXCELLENT advice. I will probably end up looking to one of your resources when I get hopelessly mired in confusion. ♥!!

[cpt-untouchable.livejournal.com]

Oi, Chomsky. You know, I started typing out the basic premise (the most important word in a sentence, which Chomsky called the 'nucleus' of the sentence, is stressed more than the others); then thought to check Wiki, to see if anyone had gone into it more comprehensively, because I'm totally not equipped to 'splain in depth. This (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics)) is probably the best, concise explanation. Hope that helps?

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you! I hadn't thought to look in the article on focus in Wikipedia. *facepalm* Thank you again!

Okay...

[triestine.livejournal.com]

[14:54] what's the nuclear stress rule?
[14:55] Well, it sounds like a rule governing the placement of stress on syllabic nuclei
[14:55] But what language are you talking about?
[14:58] in general
[15:00] Hm, seems like it's an old rule that purported to assign word stress in sentences to a particular syntactic unit
[15:01] I'm not sure it's used any longer
[then we meander away, topically... then:]
[15:13] Anyway, Mia
[15:13] The NSR seems to be formulated for English
[15:14] I am trying to find out more
[15:14] But papers on English stress grate on me
[15:15] thank you
[15:15] Because the authors' intuitions are so often at odds with mine
[15:15] And I think I have a reasonably good ear
[15:17] Ah, here we are
[15:17] "Stress is assigned to the rightmost lexically stressed unit within each successively larger phrase unit"
[15:17] "Rightmost"
[15:17] The kind of terminology you'd expect from a linguist who READS but does not LISTEN
[15:18] Basically what you are supposed to do is:
[15:18] cut out lexically unstressed words (prepositions, articles, pronouns)
[15:18] assign stress to what's left
[15:18] group it into phrases
[15:19] the LAST lexically stressed word in a given phrase should have greater stress
[15:19] Me, I don't think it works
[15:20] By "phrase" they mean "syntactic phrase"
[15:20] * mia takes notes
[15:21] Let's see
[15:22] [In a [hole in the ground] there lived [a hobbit]
[15:22] Well, frankly, I don't know how to deal with that because syntax persistently ignores inversions as un-English :/

Re: Okay...

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful! Thank you so much, you're fantastic, this is exactly the kind of explanation I needed!! And yeah, I'm not fond of what I know of the NSR, since it doesn't predict stress very well, but I'm finding it surprisingly useful for looking at stress in--get this--Brenda Starr, which is what I'm writing my paper on.

So, again, this was wonderful. You're the best!!

part 2

[triestine.livejournal.com]

[15:23] I'd rank stresses as HOLE 3, GROUND 2, LIVED 4, HOBBIT 1
[15:23] Which shows that I low-stress verbs
[15:24] And that rightward items do get more stress
[15:24] But if I said:
[15:24] A hobbit lived in a hole in the ground
[15:24] I think HOBBIT would still get most stress
[15:25] Now that I think about it, perhaps it's HOLE 2, GROUND 3
[15:25] Alliteration will do funny things to you
[15:25] * mia takes more notes
[15:25] What do you think:
[15:25] In a HOLE in the Ground there Lived a HOBBIT, or
[15:25] In a Hole in the GROUND there lived a HOBBIT?
[15:27] Maybe this would be easier on skype
[15:28] I don't think I could relay it to her in LJ sans skype if I heard it explained in skype
[15:28] if that made sense
[15:28] I can explain it in typed words
[15:29] thank you
[15:29] you're great
[15:29] I'm making notes
[15:29] But I might find it easier to think out loud
[15:29] ah
[15:30] They get a little bit of play (and "they" is Chomsky and Halle, naturally) out of allowing initial element stress in compounds
[15:30] Or what they call compounds
[15:30] So if you say HOBBIT-hole
[15:31] and not Hobbit-HOLE
[15:31] yes, she mentioned she gets confused by chomsky
[15:31] Then that's because Hobbit-hole is a compound, not two words
[15:31] Wot is the Chomskyan side? Theoretical linguistics as opposed to applied?
[15:32] Well... it's just... of or related to Chomsky and his followers
[it goes on still as I copy/paste]

Re: part 2

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

Haha, about the Chomskyan side thing, theoretical linguistics is all one big weird mass of Chomsky to me, even though I know that's not true. Applied linguistics is definitely more my thing though.

part 3

[triestine.livejournal.com]

[apologies for the loss of 'speaker' tags in here]
[15:33] Chomsky's business is to disrupt the natural evolution of linguistics as a science
[15:33] And he does that very well
[15:33] In some respects he's advanced it
[15:33] In other respects, I think, he's set it back
[15:33] Who are we talking about?
[15:33] Hi Denise!
[15:33] Linguistics!
[15:34] The nuclear stress rule isn't even mentioned in my generative phonology textbook
[15:34] Probably because it was abandoned
[15:35] Who are the he and the she referred to in the linguistics conversation?
[15:35] "He" is Noam Chomsky
[15:35] "She" is a friend of Mia's
[15:36] Thank you.
[15:36] Here's the formal definition: "The most prominent syllable of the rightmost constituent in a phrase P is the most prominent syllable of P."
[15:36] and "I" know a puny wee little about it so I thought I'd go HEY TRIP! !AYUDAME!
[15:38] What it really means is: "The last stressed syllable in a phrase is the MOST stressed syllable in that phrase"
[15:38] Or "Of all the stressed syllables in a phrase, the greatest stress will fall on the last one"
[15:39] Which is actually much more clearly stated, since "rightmost" implies a left-to-right writing system.
[here the conversation goes away again]
[I hope some of that helped? T teaches linguistics and is all into it so I take his word as solid.]

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

Wow, Ang, this is one of my favorite LJ comment threads ever.

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

♥♥♥

Also, I'm sure your paper was wonderful. ♥

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

Haha, no, it wasn't. But it was time to be done.