Guidelines to English word stress placement

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 662.

English stress placement is a highly complicated matter. There is an opinion that it

is best to treat stress placement as a property of an individual word, to be learned when

the word itself is learned. However, it is also recognized that in most cases when English speakers come across an unfamiliar word, they can pronounce it with the correct stress. Thus in principle, it should be possible to summarize rules of lexical stress placement in English, and practically all the rules will have exceptions.

In order to decide on stress placement, it is necessary to make use of some or all of

the following information:

1. whether the word is morphologically simple, or whether it is complex containing

one or more affixes (prefixes or suffixes) or a compound word;

2. the grammatical category to which the word belongs (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)

3. the number of syllables in a word;

4. the phonological structure of the syllables; [Roach 1995:88]

5. the historical origin of a word.

The following guidelinesto lexical stress placement in English should be taken as

tendencies rather than absolute rules due to exceptions to almost any rule.

Lexical stress of monosyllabic wordspresents no problem – pronounced in isolation they are said with primary stress.

Basic rules of stressing two-syllable simple wordscomprise rules of stressing verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc. The basic rule of stressing two-syllable VERBSruns that if the second syllable of the verb contains a long vowel or a diphthong, or if it ends with more than one consonant, that second syllable is stressed: apply, attract, arrive.

● if the final syllable contains a short vowel and one final consonant, the first syllable is stressed: open, enter.

● a final syllable is also unstressed if it contains ow: follow, borrow.

● any two-syllable verbs with prefixes of Germanic and Latin origin have the root

syllable stressed (see a more detailed explanation in words with prefixes).

Two syllable simple ADJECTIVESare stressed according to the same rule as two syllable verbs: 'lovely, 'even, 'hollow; cf.: di'vine, co'rrect, a'live. There are exceptions to this rule: 'honest, 'perfect.

Two-syllable NOUNShave the first syllable stressed if the second syllable contains a short vowel: dinner, money, colour. Otherwise it will be on the second syllable: de'sign, ba'loon.

Other two-syllable words such as adverbs seem to behave like verbs and adjectives.