Generation of accent in nominally premodified noun phrases
Ron Zacharski · 1992
The primary purpose of this paper is to present a set of conditions that constrain accent placement in focused nominally premodified NPs. Selkirk (1984) argues that if the premodifier is an argument of the head, then the head can be deaccented. I agree with Selkirk's proposal and argue that what is essential is not whether the premodifier is a grammatical argument of the head noun, but rather, whether it is a θ-complement in lexical conceptual structure. This proposal is evaluated by testing it against a corpus of naturally occurring data.