When do nouns control sentence stress placement?1 Aleksander Szwedek professor emeritus; Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland ABSTRACT: The relation between sentence stress and grammatical category is not a new problem, but largely ignored in recent research, in which such related topics as given/new information, focus and its scope and sentence stress have often been misdirected and misconstrued. Sentence stress placement has traditionally been described in terms of two conditions: (1) the stress must fall on a contextually new lexeme; (2) it must fall as far towards the end of the utterance as possible. The main claim of the present paper is that in n e u t r a l i n t o n a t i o n , the place of the ‘neutral’ stress, as contrasted with the ‘emphatic’/‘contrastive’/‘corrective’ stress, is controlled by the contextual information value of the noun. The analysis of simple transitive sentences in English, German and Polish, each with a different syntactic structure, allows for the following, specific claims: (a) sentence stress must fall on the contextually ‘new’ noun if such is present; (b) sentence stress must n o t fall on a contextually ‘given’ noun; (a) and (b) lead to the conclusion that other grammatical categories, regardless of whether they are ‘new’ or ‘given,’ get the stress only in the absence of a ‘new’ noun. It is also suggested that in some cases the prosodic parameters may be irrelevant in distinguishing ‘neutral’ from ‘emphatic’ stress. KEYWORDS: sentence stress placement, neutral intonation, end–focus principle, givenness, contextual information value of nouns, emphasis, contrastive/corrective interpretation. 1. Introduction The problem of the relation between sentence stress and grammatical category is not new. However, the results of very early research have been either purely statistical or intuitive and inconclusive. As early as in 1551 John Hart (edited by Bror Danielsson 1955) observed that the more important a word is, the stronger is its stress. He proposed that the most important words are nouns, adjectives, demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, principle 1 Reprinted, with minor changes, from (2017) Academic Journal of Modern Philology 6; 145–176. I wish to thank Dr. Samuel Bennet for proofreading the text and insightful comments and Małgorzata Waryszak for preparing the phonetic analyses with the Praat program.
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