There is a common view that English has word stress but Chinese does not. I examine perceived stress in disyllabic lexical entries and show two similarities between the languages: (i) when both syllables carry a designated tone, such as such as bamboo or Red Cross in English, or 北京 Beijing ‘Beijing’ in Chinese, main stress is unclear to native speakers; and (ii) when just one syllable has a designated tone, such as yoga, magpie, or about in English, or 爸_爸 ba_ba [paː][pə] ‘pa_pa (papa)’ in Chinese, it is clearly perceived to carry main stress. However, case (ii) covers 86% of disyllabic entries in English but just 5% in Chinese. The difference is attributable to the independent fact that Chinese is a tone language, in which syllables with secondary stress also carry a designated tone, whereas in English they usually do not. I also show that English and Chinese share two further similarities: First, stressed and unstressed syllables are acoustically different, and second, stress plays other phonological roles, such as phrasal stress, contrastive stress, and meter in poetry.

The use of prosodic categories gives a clearer understanding of the intonation of utterancesthan the syntactic structure that was assumed in SPE. The prosodic hierarchy includes eight categories from the highest (the phonological utterance)through the intermediate cateories (intonation phrase, phonological phrase, clitic group, phonological word, foot, syllable) to the lowest (the mora). Each unit consists exclusively of units of the next lower category, though certain derived structures are possible with nesting, as when a syllable is adjoined to a foot. In that case the original foot is a constituent of the derived larger foot and a sister to the adjoined syllable. Exemplification of segmental rules that apply in terms of each prosodic category from English and other languages. The three highest units can sometimes be restructured, either broken into smaller units or combined into a larger unit. Summary of the postlexical rules.

The syllable and the mora as units of utterances, SPE's treatment without an explicit syllable, approaches to syllables including the syllable boundary approach, the autosegmental approach, the constituent-structure approach, and the moraic approach. Conditions on onsets and codas in various languages. Rules for syllabification in English, and some exceptional patterns.