Stress rules in English adjective-noun combinations

Question

In English adjective-noun combinations the noun commonly carries the main stress:

• a big HOUSE
• a beautiful DOG

An exception to this rule are adjective-noun combinations that are treated as one unit, and the adjective carries the main stress:

• a HOT dog
• the WHITE house

However, I've also noted this stress pattern with other examples (the links are to Youtube videos):

• WHITE men, BLACK men
• ChiNESE food
• a CRAzy guy

I have noted this stress pattern in a number of examples, and my impression is that it's more common in American than in British English. Each of them might be interpreted contrastively. In the second example the speaker seems to imply that Chinese food is somehow more fun or enticing than, say, Italian food. Similarly, in the first example that information that the speaker is talking about black men, not white men seems to be key.

But I've always found this stress pattern surprising, to me the context in these examples doesn't warrant this kind of contrastive focus (as in "No, I want ChiNESE food, not ITAlian food."). Then again, I'm not a native speaker. So my questions are:

1) Does this stress pattern strike anyone else as remarkable, or is it just me?

2) Is "contrastive stress/focus" the best analysis of these examples?

3) Is it more frequent in American English than other varieties, such as British English (note that all the examples are from American English)?

4) Has this stress pattern become more frequent in the last decades or so?

If this stress pattern is something more than just ordinary contrastive focus, references would be appreciated (but not strictly necessary ;)

Answer 1

I'm a native speaker of American English, and none of the examples you have given strikes me as marked in any way.

I don't know what the latest discourse-structure-based theories of focus would say about these examples, but my intuition is that they illustrate focus avoidance on "given" constituents. men, food, and guy are somehow "given" in their respective contexts. It's true that those words may not have literally been uttered yet at the time they appear in the discourse, but there is something generic about the entities to which they refer in those contexts, in a pragmatic sense.

What is informative in the first discourse, for example, is the race of the men. Leading up to the mention of the men, the expectation is built up that St. Nicholas is accompanied by some perhaps unexpected entity. His being accompanied by men is not so remarkable (with the introduction of the phrase accompanied by one is biased to expect some category of human), but the fact that they are black is what the speaker expects to be novel and informative for the listener. It's true that one could think of black as being contrasted with other races, but I don't think this is contrastive focus in the usual sense, since the speaker isn't explicitly contrasting it with another specific race. If St. Nicholas were accompanied by six to eight black sheep, I would expect the prominence marking to shift to sheep, since people are not usually accompanied by sheep. In that case the focus would actually be ambiguous--it could be marking narrower focus on just sheep or broader focus on the entire constituent black sheep.

In the second example, food is somewhat expected after We've ordered..., but the fact that it's Chinese is informative (and in this particular case enticing--it's a selling point to get the listener to help the speaker) to the listener. Again, had they ordered Chinese dancers, I would have expected dancers to be prominent.

In the third example, the characters have all been talking about the person who has breached their security--the guy. Even more than in the previous two examples, the guy part of crazy guy is given explicitly in the discourse--he's the topic of their conversation. I should mention that, to my ears, the prominence pattern is actually not so clear in this example--I can convince myself that the speaker is putting prominence on crazy or that he's putting it on guy (it's not just about which has higher pitch--sometimes prominent syllables can get lower pitch in English). If he is placing prominence on guy, I would believe that he is contrasting it with the terrorists mentioned by the other character--"not a terrorist (or a group of terrorists)--just a guy".

I don't have data on this, but my impression is that these focus phenomena are not unique to American English. I've definitely heard British speakers use similar patterns. The same holds for earlier generations of speakers.