Metrical systems differ in patterns of stress assignment, the domains over which those patterns are built, and acoustic manifestations of stress. It has been widely debated in the phonological/phonetic literature how stress should be represented, what mechanisms govern its assignment, and whether the phonetic underpinnings of primary/secondary stress exist independently of other prominence effects (e.g. boundary strengthening, pitch accents). This Element addresses these fundamental issues on the basis of an in-depth study of a hybrid (lexical-grammatical) metrical system of Ukrainian. It synthesizes previous results with new findings, focusing on the phonetic as well as formal description of the Ukrainian system. The lexical-grammatical stress interactions in Ukrainian pose a challenge for current metrical theories, shed light on the relation between the lexical and grammatical stress domains, and the relationship between categorical and gradient aspects of the metrical system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This is the first full-scale discussion of English phonology since Chomsky and Halle's seminal The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). The book enphasizes the analysis using ordered rules and builds on SPE by incorporating lexical and metrical and prosodic analysis and the insights afforded by Lexical Phonology. It provides clear explanations and logical development throughout, introducing rules individually and then illustrating their interactions. These features make this influential theory accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds in linguistics and phonology. Rule-ordering diagrams summarize the crucial ordering of approximately 85 rules. Many of the interactions result in phonological opacity, where either the effect of a rule is not evident in the output or its conditions of application are not present in the output, due to the operation of later rules. This demonstrates the superiority of a rule-based account over output oriented approaches such as Optimality Theory or pre-Generative structuralist phonology.