Prosodic end-weight reflects phrasal stress

Abstract

Prosodic end-weight refers to the well-documented tendency of prosodically heavier constituents to be preferred at the ends of domains when other factors (e.g. semantics, accessibility, and syntactic complexity) are controlled. Various explanations for prosodic end-weight have been put forth, including complexity deferral, final lengthening, rhythm, phonotactics, and nuclear stress. This article adduces several new arguments for phrasal stress as a unified explanation for prosodic end-weight and proposes a constraint-based theory of the stress-weight interface in sentential prosody.