Degrees of prosodic prominence

How does the spoken language react to the distribution of the degrees of CD as determined by the interplay of the non-prosodic factors of FSP? Is there a relationship between this distribution and the distribution of degrees of prosodic prominence? But can we speak of degrees of PP? For instance, O'Connor and Arnold's treatment of the English system of intonation and their system of tonetic notation (O'Connor and Arnold 1973) permit the conclusion that the configuration of prosodic features within what is termed by them ‘tune’ and here ‘tone unit’ (‘a stretch of speech containing one intonation nucleus’ CGEL 1356) displays a hierarchy of PP.

Within the tone unit, the section constituted by the head and the nucleus shows greater PP than the sections serving as pre-head and tail. The most prominent feature of the entire tone unit is the nucleus. On the other hand, the lightest feature, occurring either outside or inside the head, is absence of stress. As the head and the nucleus exceed in PP the pre-head and the tail, O'Connor and Arnold regard the stresses inside the head as well as the nucleus as accented, and the stresses occurring in the pre-head and tail as unaccented (1973: 31–6). All this suggests at least four degrees of PP: (i) absence of stress (occurring inside or outside the head); (ii) stress not combined with accent (occurring on stressed syllables in the pre-head or the tail); (iii) stress combined with accent (occurring on stressed syllables inside the head); and (iv) nuclear stress, or for short, nucleus (see also Gimson's (1970: 267) four degrees of accentuation).