Philosophy of mind-reading, and stress

Here's a very nice post by Language Log's Heidi Harley that illustrates what happens when good noun modifiers go bad.  In the example she gives, there are three consecutive noun phrases and it's not immediately obvious how to identify heads and modifiers among them.  The phrase is "philosophy of mind reading group" - the ambiguity is between (philosophy of mind reading) (group), on the one hand, and (philosophy of mind) (reading group) on the other. 

Prof. Harley's post is made more interesting by sentence diagrams and sound files illustrating how, in spoken English, stress breaks the ambiguity.  She refers to the "compound stress rule" and links to another Language Log post on the subject - the link is broken, so I found a different one to link.

English forms compounds so readily that I wonder if there is really an analogue to the compound stress rule in other languages that are less compound-friendly.  Is there a change in stress when compounds form in German, one of the few languages that is more compound-happy than English?

Hindi is a very even-stress language; unlike English, in which there are complex rules of word stress, all syllables in Hindi should be given the same stress.  What might be heard to English-speakers as difference in stress (for example, in the minimal pair कमल kamal, lotus, and कमाल kamaal, wonder) is actually a difference in vowel length.  So although Hindi does form compounds, I don't think there would be any stress-shift analogous to English.

Comments

[John]

I was taught that English was stress-timed, and Hindi was syllable-timed. So in English, stressed syllables are spoden at a consistent rate, and unstressed syllables have to be crowded in. German is also stress-timed. Whereas in Hindi, every syllable is spoken at a constant rate.