Our treatment of stress is thus very easy to state. The rule below
can be paraphased as ``if a syllable is identical to the focussed
syllable, then the rhyme of that syllable will include the stress mark
segment (`^'), if it isn't it won't''.
Stress:
<phn $yll rhyme> == IF:<EQ:<$yll "<phn root focus>">
THEN ^
ELSE Null>.
We subscribe to the the (conventional) view that all syllables in polysyllabic roots have the same basic structure: we take a root such as Freude (/frOyd@/) to consist of two syllables, with the second syllable having the onset /d/ and the peak /@/. Our view of polysyllabic roots is thus distinct from that of Bleiching (1992, 1994): she would represent the /d/ of Freude as the coda and the /@/ as the ``coda extension'' of the initial syllable. Our notion of focussed syllable thus equates with the only (conventionally structured) syllable in the disyllabic roots presented in Bleiching (1992, 1994). While the notion of focussed syllable was not discussed explicitly in either Cahill (1993) or in Bleiching (1992, 1994), it is implicit in this work. Indeed, German roots are rarely more than three or four syllables long and the vast majority of underived roots are monosyllabic. Since most of the roots considered here are monosyllabic, patterns do not really emerge, but, in languages that are predominantly suffixing, as German is, the final syllable of the root is usually the focussed syllable. However, in German there is significant variation, with the focussed syllable occurring as both initial and final in disyllabic roots. We can provide (schematically) for those disyllabic roots where the focus is on the initial syllable along the following lines:
InitFocusDisyllRoot:
..
<phn root focus> == syl2
<phn root form> == Disyllable.
