198 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
There is, of course, nothing new in attributing importance in verbal
messages to those words uttered with prominent syllables. Sweet spoke
over a century ago of ‘the principle of emphasis, which gives the strongest
stress to the most important word’ (1875–6), already making the link
between prominence and word significance. Equally, the whole of the
long debate on ‘sentence stress’ functions necessarily within the arena
of the variable statuses which words (and by extension, lexical items)
have in sentences. Certain features of the debate on nuclear stress placement
are relevant to the present concern, for Brazil’s account of prominence
subsumes and neutralizes apparent dichotomies and irregularities by
providing an explanation of prominence independent of the issue of
nucleus placement.
The syntax-dominated position of the transformationalists (Chomsky and
Halle 1968) and later restatements (Chomsky 1972:passim), including re-
orientations accepting semantic and discourse constraints (Jackendoff 1972:243),
created problems difficult to resolve with regard to sentences anomalous to
the general account of surface stress in terms of deep structural prescriptions.
Wells and Local (1983) observe that the debate as epitomized in Bresnan
(1971) and subsequent semanticist attacks on the syntax-biased position,
never really freed itself from ‘the purview of syntax and semantics’. Theories
which see sentence stress as somehow fixed to a neutral ‘right-placed’ position
have to confront an enormous number of utterances where a good deal of
matter in clause-final position is not stressed, even where lexico-syntactic,
semantic or ‘textual’ reasons would seem to suggest it ought to be. Thus
anomalies are no less apparent in the ‘textual’ approach of Halliday (1967,
1970), in which a neutral or unmarked position for the main stress of a
sentence is central to the theory.
The transformational approach saw the marked version as derivable
from the neutral deep structure; the textual approach sought explanations
in notions such as contrastiveness or givenness (Halliday 1967:23). Both
approaches have been cogently criticized in recent years (Schmerling, 1976;
Culicover and Rochemont 1983; Oakeshott-Taylor 1984, provide succinct
overviews). Base rules which attempted to generalize nuclear stress to
right-placement, or to the last lexical item in a sentence, failed to explain
numerous counter-examples where stress seemed to fall on, for instance,
pronouns, or penultimate lexical items. Crystal discusses such inconsistencies
and entertains the possibility of the final lexical item in a sentence being
one ‘assumed by the speaker to be familiar or obvious’ (1975:26) and thus
not to be stressed, an echo of his earlier assertion that it is ‘up to the
speaker’ which word is stressed most strongly (1969:263). Bolinger (1972a)
attacked inconsistencies from a semantic point of view, accusing the syntax-
based school of ‘attributing to syntax what belongs to semantics’. He
looked at examples where right-placed lexical verbs are not stressed, as in
‘I’ve got no CLOTHES to wear’ and some where they are, as in ‘I’ve a
point to EMPHASIZE’, and accounted for such variability as dependent