Stress timing and Santa Claus – a rant

Stress timing is a term with only one legitimate use: as a shorthand term for pedagogic exercises which demonstrate the relationship between prominent and non-prominent syllables (stressed and unstressed syllables if you prefer) in isolated clauses.

The term, even in this use, is misleading. It is a relic from a much discredited (but surviving, and often repeated) theory about the the rhythms of different languages. The theory is an attractive one: lovely, neat, appealing, and in accord with intuition. But the experimental evidence against its viability exists in huge dollops – it is easy to refute, it has been refuted, it should be dead in the water. It should only be mentioned in historical surveys of the crazy things we used to believe about language.

But it is wheeled out and repeated far too often, and it remains alive largely because of the usefulness of the term as a pedagogic shorthand, and the comparative ‘difficulty’ of alternative explanations of the theory. It also seems to have power to capture the imagination, and suppress reasoning.

Academic explanations of the theory often begin with a disclaimer ‘Oh it’s been proven to be untrue, and the situation is really more complex than believed by the original proponents of the theory, but nevertheless …’ and then a description of the theory is again presented.

It’s as if the standard explanation for the delivery of presents over Christmas began with a cursory acknowledgement of the role of the post-office, private delivery companies, Amazon, and digital downloads – but then giving far more prominence to the story of Santa Claus.

He makes a list, checks it twice, gets the elves to package the presents in Lapland and then loads the sleigh, and has Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and his team pull the sleigh around the globe, and stops off at every house on Christmas Eve to slide down the chimney to put the presents under the Christmas tree.

For goodness sake! There ain’t no Santa Claus, and there ain’t no stress-timing.

Years ago I wrote something about this here.