Informativity and analogy in English compound stress

It has long been claimed (e.g. Sweet 1892, Bolinger 1972, Ladd 1984) that informativity has an influence on the leftward or rightward stress assigned to nounnoun combinations in English, but the few available empirical studies of this hypothesis have produced conflicting results (Plag & Kunter 2010, Bell 2013, Bell & Plag 2012). In this paper, using the same measures as Bell & Plag (2012) but with a different set of data, we provide further evidence that more informative constituents in the right-hand position tend to be stressed. This result fits with the general propensity of speakers to accentuate important information (e.g. Bolinger 1972). The results also raise the question of the relationship between informativity and constituent identity, which is the strongest known predictor of compound stress pattern (e.g. Plag 2010, Arndt-Lappe 2011). An exploration of this problem shows that the two factors are interrelated; we argue that this relationship is best conceptualized as resulting from an underlying effect of informativity on other predictors of prominence, including constituent identity.