Some Rules of Word-Stress
Word accentuation tendencies and basic stress patterns. The main rules of word stress
Some scholars, Chomsky and Halle (Chomsky, N., Halle, M., 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row, New York) make contrast between two ways of representing English word stress or accent. For Chomsky–Halle and for Garde, full vowels are always stressed; for the dictionary makers, full vowels can be either accented or unaccented. The dictionary representations, with alternating accented and unaccented syllables, suggest a natural way of assigning foot structure to syllables. Feet can be ternary, binary, or unary, but the latter are permitted only word finally. All syllables are assigned to some foot, with the exception that there are some word-initial syllables that remain unfooted (and by implication, unaccented). For most English words neither foot structure nor the location of accents is part of the lexical entry. Hence, there must be a set of metrification rules for creating feet. The location of the accents then is easily derived from the generated foot structures. The rules can be applied to various kinds of morphologically simple (underived) words. No additional mechanisms are required for morphologically complex forms. The metrification rules apply simultaneously to each morphological constituent. This manner of forming feet is not cyclic in accordance with the usual interpretation of that concept.
Many theories connected with word stress are connected with its Placement in different languages. We may classify types of words stress in different languages in the following way. Languages with:
fixed stress:
1. French (the stress falls on the last syllable): e.g. l’ecole, habiter, la maison etc.
2. Finish and Czech (The stress – on the 1st syllable)
e.g. Fin. – sauna; Czech podzim, Slovak jesen
3. Polish (The stress – on the last but one syllable)
e.g. kobięta – womаn, pisklęta – nestling, žycię – life
free stress:
1. English e.g. 'appetite – be'ginning – ba'loon
2. Russian e.g. όзеро – погόда – молокό
Free word stress may fall on any syllable in the word and even exceed its bounds: compare Russian words for example: Голова – Головушка – Голову – На голову.
Also the word stress in English and Russian may be performing the semantic function of differentiating lexical units, parts of speech, grammatical forms.
e.g. 'contrast – con'trast дóма – домá
'habit – ha'bitual вóды – воды
Despite the fact that
Ø The recessivetendency results in placing the word-stress on the initial syllable.
Rhythmic tendency results in
In sentences with
The rhythmic stress
n In words of
n In prefixal words
n Suffixes:
Up to this point we have talked about stress though there was a simple distinction between "stressed" and "unstressed" syllables with no intermediate levels; such a treatment would be a two-level analysis of stress. Usually, however, we have to recognise one or more intermediate levels. It should be remembered that now we are dealing only with stress within the word; this means that we are looking at words as they are said in isolation, which is a rather artificial situation – we do not often say words in isolation, except for a few such as 'yes', 'no', 'possibly', 'please' and interrogative words such as 'what', 'who', etc., but looking at words in isolation does help us to see stress placement and stress levels more clearly than studying them in the context of continuous speech.
Let us begin by looking at the word 'around' a'r„nd, where the stress always falls clearly on the last syllable and the first syllable is weak. From the point of view of stress, the most important fact about the way we pronounce this word is that on the second syllable the pitch of the voice does not remain level, but usually falls from a higher to a lower pitch. We might diagram the pitch movement as shown below, where the two parallel lines represent the speaker's high and low pitch level:
The prominence that results from this pitch movement, or tone, gives the strongest type of stress; we call this tonic strong stresswhen we wish to refer specifically to this type of stress. It is also called primary stress.
In some words, we can observe a type of stress that is weaker than tonic strong stress but stronger than that of the first syllable of 'around', for example in the first syllables of the words 'photographic' /ft•'grf‰k/, 'anthropology' /nœr•'pŒl•G‰/. The third syllables of 'activated' /'kt‰v‡t‰d/, 'enterprising' /'ent•pr‚aiz‰š) are also quire prominent, but most speakers of English would probably not feel that they were as strongly stressed as the first two examples. The stress in the first two examples can be called non-tonic strong stress; it is also called secondary stress. It is sometimes represented in transcription with a low mark, so that the examples could be transcribed as /,ft•'grf‰k/, /,nœr•'pŒl•G‰/.
We have now identified two levels of stress: tonic strong (or primary) and non-tonic strong (or secondary), as well as a third level which could be called unstressed and regarded as being the absence of any recognisable amount of prominence. These are the three levels that we will use in describing English stress. However, it is worth noting that unstressed syllables containing •, ‰, or a syllabic consonant will sound less prominent than an unstressed syllable containing some other vowel. For example, the first syllable of 'poetic' /p'et‰k/ is more prominent than the first syllable of 'pathetic' /p•'œet‰k/. This could be used as a basis for a further division of stress levels, giving us a third and fourth level, but it seems unnecessarily complex to do so.