Abstract
Kunter (2011) provides detailed research of the stress patterns in English compounds using perception experiments and acoustic measurements with statistical analysis. His analysis clearly shows how compounds are pronounced in real data. However, like previous studies on this topic, this work has some weaknesses. One of them is that it does not offer theoretical perspectives on compounding in general. The analysis based on analogy does not fully reveal the intrinsic nature of compounds. I argue that prominence in compounds should be studied in terms of various components of grammar including syntactic structure, semantic restrictiveness of modification, pragmatic knowledge of words and phonological length.
