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This paper presents a dictionary-based study of French loanwords in contemporary English in order to investigate the location of primary stress in these loanwords. Four factors are found to be significant predictors of the position of primary stress: endings, word complexity, the segmental structure of the final syllable, and syllable count. Moreover, this study confirms previous observations on the tendency for American English to have more final stress in French loanwords than British English. Finally, the implications of our findings are discussed in light of a model that assumes that English phonology consists of distinct interacting subsystems.

In English, some complex words can display exceptional accent preservation (EAP): they can preserve an accent from their base even when this would violate a general restriction against adjacent accents (e.g. retúrn → retùrnée ). This article analyses EAP both empirically and theoretically. The analysis of a set of 291 derivatives from Wells (2008) shows that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the relative frequency of the base and its derivative and partially also to syllable structure, and that these two factors have a cumulative effect. It is also shown that the existence of a more deeply embedded base (e.g. colléct → colléctive → còllectívity ~ collèctívity ) can increase the likelihood for a derivative to display EAP. A formal account of the phenomenon is proposed building on Collie's (2007, 2008) ‘fake cyclicity’ analysis, using weighted constraints (Pater 2009, 2016) and Max-Ent-OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Finally, a model of lexical access building on Hay's (2001, 2003) model and integrating more deeply embedded bases is proposed.

In most of the literature on English phonology, historically prefixed words such as contain, respect or submit are seen as having no morphological structure synchronically. However, such words were treated as complex in the early generative literature and are still analysed in that way in part of the literature. In this paper, we seek to review the evidence for the claim that such words are simplex words, which predicts that they should pattern with words with no internal structure in their phonological and morphological behaviours and in psycholinguistic experiments. We show that the evidence does not support that claim and shows that these words should be treated as morphologically complex units, although they differ from words with productive morphology. As these words tend to be partly or entirely opaque semantically, this raises the question of how such structures may be learned. We argue that the recurrence of forms is the main factor leading to their identification and lay out a possible order of acquisition of various morphological structures. Finally, we argue that theories of phonology may account for this by allowing the reference to morphological constituents whose semantics are impoverished.

This paper deals with English vowel reduction and focuses on what is generally referred to as the Arab Rule (Ross 1972 i.a.). Vowels tend to reduce if the preceding syllable is light, whereas they do not reduce if the preceding syllable is heavy. Our purpose is twofold: first, based on the scrutiny of Wells (2008), we evaluate the efficiency of the Arab Rule and show that is empirically verified. Second, we propose an analysis of blocking contexts couched within CVCV phonology (Lowenstamm 1996). We use two central notions such as Government and Licensing, and show that vowel reduction only applies to “governing-and-governable” vowels.

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.

In English, some complex words can display exceptional accent preservation (EAP): they can preserve an accent from their base even when this would violate a general restriction against adjacent accents (e.g. retúrn → retùrnée). This paper analyses EAP both empirically and theoretically. The analysis of a set of 291 derivatives from Wells (2008) shows that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the relative frequency of the base and its derivative and partially also to syllable structure, and that these two factors have a cumulative effect. It is also shown that the existence of a more deeply embedded base (e.g. colléct → colléctive → còllectívity ~ collèctívity) can increase the likelihood for a derivative to display EAP. A formal account of the phenomenon is proposed building on Collie’s (2007, 2008) “fake cycicity” analysis, using weighted constraints (Pater 2009, 2016) and Max-Ent-OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Finally, a model of lexical access building on Hay’s (2001, 2003) model and integrating more deeply embedded bases is proposed.

This paper investigates the relationship between syllable weight and secondary stress in a corpus of 1450 English suffixal derivatives. In order to do so, two definitions of syllable weight have been used to code the data and we evaluated whether syllable weight had any impact on stress preservation, as proposed by Pater (1995; 2000). The results indicate that syllable weight has no influence whatsoever on stress preservation, in both definitions of syllable weight under examination.