PERSISTENCE OF THE LATIN ACCENT IN THE NOMINAL ...

The initial input, seen in Figure 1-7A contains violations such as clashing (stress bearing
adjacent syllables or terminal elements) in contrast to the preferred pattern of alternating stress.
Avoidance of non-alternating stresses licenses repair strategies such as stress retraction or stress
deletion (Prince 1983, 21). Kiparsky (1979, 424) ascribes these adjustments to the Rhythm Rule
which formalizes the universal principle of eurhythmicity, the alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables in a word or phrase.
The bidimensional representation in Figure 1-7 captures the linear arrangement of the SPE
approach in the horizontal display of segments in the word, labeled weak or strong, while the
vertical dimension, the metrical grid, shows stress assigned to those elements that can bear stress.
The Liberman/Prince (1979, 1977) approach correctly predicts the locus of primary and
secondary stresses in words (and phrases) but does not develop a full-fledged metrical theory.
The Prosodic Hierarchy
The word level Lexical Category Prominence Rule (LCPR) of Liberman and Prince
leaves some unresolved questions which are addressed in Selkirk (1980). Beginning with a
discussion of the English syllable and generation of a tree-like structure of the syllabic template
for the word flounce, Selkirk (1980, 568-569) also incorporates the use of s/w markers.
However, in this case the s/w distinction reflects the relative sonority of the components of the
onset and rhyme (nucleus and coda). At the first level, the s/w distinction designates the onset as
weak in terms of sonority, or [+cons], while the rhyme is [+son]; all other s/w labels also reflect
a sonority hierarchy. The syllable can be without onset and without coda but the strongest
element (s terminal dominated by s terminal), the nucleus, must be present and constitutes the
stress bearing element. In Figure 1-8 the nucleus is the only [+vocalic] element in the complex
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