Metrical Phonology - Advantages of Metrical Phonology

Advantages of Metrical Phonology

Metrical phonology offers a number of advantages over a system representing stress as a feature that applies to individual segments or syllables, without reference to the other syllables in a phrase. Creators of traditional feature systems posited the stress feature, which differed from other phonological features in several key ways. For instance, the feature stress had an arbitrary number of values or levels, rather than two or some justified number more than two. In addition, the non-primary stress values in these systems were only defined relative to the primary stress value, and did not have local acoustic or articulatory effects. By not treating stress as a feature of an individual segment, metrical phonology avoids the inexplicable differences between the stress feature and other phonological features.

Metrical phonology also correctly predicts the ambiguity between broad and narrow focus. There are two possible metrical patterns for two-word phrases: S-W and W-S. However, there are three possible patterns of focus for such phrases: narrow focus on the first word, narrow focus on the second word, and broad focus. For instance, the phrase "Gus skied" can either be pronounced "GUS skied" (S-W) or "Gus SKIED" (W-S). These two realizations are the only options for answering the three questions: Who skied? (narrow focus on 'Gus'), What did Gus do? (narrow focus on 'skied'), and What happened yesterday? (broad focus).

Finally, metrical phonology is consistent with patterns of deaccenting in which accents can shift both left and right. This is because swapping S and W nodes will cause stress to move left if the S node was originally on the right, and move right if it was originally on the left. Such bi-directional movement is more difficult to predict under a stress-shift rule, which would specify the direction of movement.