Word stress: rules and representations

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The project will explore the mechanisms underlying word stress in German. It starts from two assumptions: first that, inspite of a number of recent theoretical and empirical studies on word stress in German, central issues in the description and explanation of word stress have not been solved adequately, and second that linguistic regularities have a direct correlate in terms of neurophysiological representations. On the basis of these assumptions we propose to conduct neurolinguistic experiments on the nature of word stress phenomena. Primarily through a series of EEG experiments, the word stress regularities, their possible underlying prosodic structures, markedness aspects as part of prosodic constraints and/or lexical prosodic representations, the relationship between regular and irregular items, and the neuro-cognitive representation and function of stress will be explored. In particular, assuming that penultimate stress is the default stress pattern in German (Wiese, 1996), we will investigate how this pattern can be modified by factors like quantity sensitivity, edge marking, prosodic structure, lexical associations and others, and how these factors can be captured within a theoretical model of (German) word stress.