Stress placement in Tswana English: the makings of a coherent system

This paper investigates stress placement in one variety of Black South African English (BSAE), namely Tswana English. Current research points to two possible hypotheses about stress in BSAE. The penult‐hypothesis holds that the penult syllable is stressed in BSAE, while the random‐hypothesis suggests that a variety of stress assignment strategies are employed by BSAE speakers, without the possibility of predicting stress placement. A data corpus of 333 polysyllabic words was analysed in detail to determine the properties of the Tswana English stress system. These properties were subsequently interpreted by means of Optimality Theory. The major conclusion is that stress is stored lexically in function words, but a coherent system of ranked constraints exists for content words. These constraints account for a very high percentage of the observed data. Both the penult‐ and random‐hypotheses are rejected. It is shown that stress is attracted by the penult, but superheavy final syllables may attract stress to the final syllable, while the presence of certain suffixes may attract stress to the antepenult.