Preservation of main stress

As frequently mentioned above, -ize derivatives never exhibit a stress shift. This suggests the operation of a high-ranking constraint against stress shift (IDENT-HEAD). Given that stress is not an underlying property in English, the constraint ensuring stress identity must necessarily be an output-output constraint, and can be defined as in (1):

(1) 

The following tableau shows that IDENT-HEAD must be ranked higher than R-ALIGN-HEAD.

The optimal candidate satisfies the highest general constraints FT-BIN, TROCH, NONFINALITY and the constraint demanding preservation of main stress. The elimination of candidate (2c) shows that two violations of R-ALIGN-HEAD are less costly than a violation of IDENT-HEAD, which is a clear indication for the higher rank of IDENT-HEAD over R-ALIGN-HEAD. Disregarding haplology effects for the moment, the proposed ranking makes the right predictions also for consonant-final dactylic bases such as ho̒spital·.

Unlike underived nouns, words like ho̒spitalı̒ze have primary stress on the pre-antepenult. In other words, R-ALIGN-HEAD is violated three times. This could in principle be remedied by shifting the main stress further to the right, but the high ranking of IDENT-HEAD does not permit this, as candidate (3b) shows.