A Null Theory of Phrase and Compound Stress Author(s): Guglielmo Cinque Source: Linguistic Inquiry , Spring, 1993, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 239-297 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178812 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Linguistic Inquiry This content downloaded from 95.90.214.96 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 19:11:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Guglielmo Cinque A Null Theory of Phrase and Compound Stress 1 Introduction Since the publication of Chomsky, Halle, and Lukoff 1956, it has generally been assumed that (surface) constituent structure is the fundamental determinant of phrase (and sen- tence) stress. A natural question is whether, in addition to syntactic constituency and principles of Universal Grammar, we need some language-specific phonological rule as well. The various generative treatments that have been proposed in the literature all have, either explicitly or implicitly, claimed that we do in assuming some form of Chomsky and Halle's (1968) Nuclear Stress Rule. Here, I would like to explore the possibility that no language-specific proviso is necessary and that the (unmarked) pattern of phrase stress can be entirely determined on the basis of surface syntactic constituent structure, given the word stresses and the general principles of grid construction defined in Halle and Vergnaud's (1987) refilnement of Liberman's (1975) metrical grid theory.