The stress systems of human languages have been the subject of intensive research by contemporary phonological theory since the development of metrical phonology in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In fact, stress studies have played a prominent role in phonological theory since Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (1968) (SPE), where stress is analyzed as one of the set of language's distinctive features. The special status of stress was captured in later work such as

more »

... erman's (1975) metrical grid, in which "stress is defined in terms of an abstract two-dimensional array that plots metrical positions for level of prominence" (Kentowicz 1993: 553), thus providing the basic tools to capture the primary and secondary stress assignment parameters in the world's languages, a framework enriched later on in the seminal works by Halle and Vergnaud (1987) and Idsardi (1992) . It is also worth mentioning Hayes' (1995) influential treatise on metrical theory, which according to Kager (1995: 437) put forth "a new and highly articulated version of metrical stress theory whose major theoretical innovation is an asymmetric foot inventory" based on the analysis of the "stress patterns of a large number of languages, many of which had not been previously analyzed in the metrical literature". More recently, within the framework of Optimality Theory, the relation between prosodic structure constituents and stress assignment parameters such as stress assignment directionality, (un)boundedness systems, head position, footing and weight (in)sensitivity systems has been seen to be controlled by a ranked set of constraints. Much of the work on stress and stress systems carried out after SPE has been extended successfully in both comparative analyses of various languages and monographic studies of stress in languages other than English, such as Harris's (1983 Harris's ( , 1985 Harris's ( , 1989a Harris's ( , 1989b and Roca's (1988 , 1997 ) works on Spanish, or Mester's (1994 trailblazing exploration of Latin's quantitative trochee. In this monographic collection of studies, we have not attempted to present a comprehensive survey of how stress interacts with other aspects of linguistic structure. Rather, it brings together seven representative samples of the multiple perspectives taken in current research on this topic, each embodying a different approach to the analysis of stress and its connections with other components of the grammar.