On the sources of word prosody

In SPE (Chomsky & Halle 1968), stress was formalised as a distinctive feature, on a par with [consonantal], [continuant] and so on. Serious problems with this approach were pinpointed in Liberman & Prince (1977). Building on Liberman (1975), these authors conceived of stress as the product of a syllable-grounded network of hierarchical relations. In particular, they argued that, in any given domain (say, a word), syllables are prosodically organised into layers of binary constituents, each constituent made up of a strong element, construable as the ‘head’, and its weak sister. A path linking heads uninterruptedly leads from the tree root to the most salient, and thus primary stressed, syllable of the domain, which they named the ‘designated terminal element’.