Languages & Linguistics
Stress of a Word
The stress of a word refers to the emphasis or prominence placed on a particular syllable within the word. In many languages, including English, the stress pattern can change the meaning or grammatical function of a word. Understanding stress patterns is important for proper pronunciation and comprehension in spoken language.
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11 Key excerpts on "Stress of a Word"
eBook - PDFThe Sounds of Language
An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology
- Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
The linguistic principles that determine varying levels of emphasis on the different syl- lables in a word are termed stress systems. The definition and uses of linguistic stress are discussed in Section 16.1. Section 16.2 surveys the different kinds of stress systems found in the languages of the world, and 16.3 lays out the reasons why a feature [+/− stress] is inad- equate to cover the data. Section 16.4 then introduces the hierarchical grid and tree structures that have been proposed to account for stress patterns, and introduces different types of metrical feet. Section 16.5 concludes with a discussion of the complex stress patterns of English, including the interaction of phonological and morphological information. 16.1 what is linguistic stress? Linguistic stress can be defined as a prominence relation between syllables. Just as we can usually count the number of syllables in a word, native speakers of English can also pick out the one syllable that is most prominent: phoNOlogy, phoNEtics, SYNtax. So, as with syllable structure, stress is a native-speaker competence that a theory of phonology must account for. Stress can sometimes be contrastive: In Russian, for example, if the string of segments / muka/ is stressed on the first syllable the words means “torment” and if it’s stressed on the second it means “flour.” In English, sometimes the only difference between a verb and a noun is the pattern of stress: we reject the reject, record the record, convert the convert, insult someone with an insult, etc. Linguistic stress is always a matter of relative prominence, and speakers can distinguish multiple relative levels. Consider the word “Alabama.” We should all agree that [bæ] is the most prominent, and bears the main stress of the word.
eBook - PDF- Pamela Rogerson-Revell(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
9 Word Stress Introduction Cruttenden (2008:249) claims that ‘differing accentual patterns of words are as important to their recognition as the sequence of phonemes’. The importance of word stress patterns is further illustrated by the fact that native English speaking children frequently omit unstressed syllables when learning words, such as ‘banana’ /n ɑ :n ə / and ‘guitar’ /t ɑ :/. While the signifi-cance of word stress might be greater for native speaker comprehension than NNS (Jenkins 2000), there is little doubt that the complexity of English word stress can be challenging to many L2 learners. Many learners have first languages where word stress or accent is regular or fixed, such as French or Turkish where stress falls on the final syllable, or Polish or Spanish where stress falls on the penultimate syllable. In English, however, word stress is variable across words which can problematic for such learners. Nevertheless, there are patterns and tendencies which are relatively easily taught and can be of considerable help to L2 learners. Activity 1 Think of languages with which you are familiar. Does word stress fall regularly on a certain syllable? Does it vary? Are there any ‘rules’ that you are aware of? The concept of stress This is not an easy concept to define but it is possible to illustrate. In addition, most people are able to accept that some syllables are perceived as having greater stress than others. Stress can also be referred to as ‘prominence’, ‘emphasis’, or ‘accent’. Cruttenden (2008) calls stress ‘ accent ’ and he illustrates the concept in the following way: ‘The syllable or syllables of a word which stand out from the remainder are said to be accented, to receive the accent .’ (Cruttenden 2008:235) English Phonology and Pronunciation Teaching 138 The hearer perceives an accented or stressed syllable as more prominent than an unstressed syllable. Prominence relates to the amount of muscular energy used to produce a syllable.
eBook - PDF- Bruce Hayes, Bruce P. Hayes(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
14 Stress, Stress Rules, and Syllable Weight 14.1 Introduction Stress is generally taken to involve the force or intensity with which a syllable is uttered. Stress is also detectable from the many effects it has on segments, since it appears so often in the environment of segmental rules. The influence of stress on segments has been treated already in several locations in this text. The present chapter covers the rules that determine the position of the stress, relating these rules to syllables and to syllable structure. 14.2 Some General Properties of Stress 14.2.1 Culminativity In most stress languages, every word has exactly one main stress. This observation is sometimes stated by saying that stress is culminative; each word “culminates” in one main-stressed syllable. By the principle of culminativity, [cdÑg], [ckæt], and [chÑfls] are possible words in English, but a stressless form like *[bv] would not be. There is one apparent exception to the principle of culminativity: grammatical words, such as articles, pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, are often stressless, as in the word the in the book [¨v cbäk]. The evident reason why some grammatical words can be stressless is that they are typically used in the presence of a stressed content word. The grammatical word “leans on” (more formally: is clitic to) the content word, and in a sense forms a part of the con- tent word for phonological purposes. When such a grammatical word is used by itself, it receives an artificially imposed stress ([c¨Îp] or [c¨ip]), and thus satisfies the principle of culminativity. 272 Stress, Stress Rules, and Syllable Weight 14.2.2 No syllable-internal contrasts Up to now we have treated stress as a property of vowels and other [+syllabic] segments; one speaks of “stressed vowels,” “unstressed vowels,” and so on. But it is probably more accurate to consider stress as a property of syllables; that is, the units that can be stressed or stressless are syllables, and not segments.
- Harry van der Hulst(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Moreover, the discussion of Norwegian word stress has the specific func-tion of providing an example of how a language of this group may be analysed in the recent framework of Optimality Theory, as developed in McCarthy & Prince (1993), and later work by these authors. 2 8.1. Word stress in West-Germanic languages Mieke Trommelen and Wim Zonneveld 8.1.1. English 8.1.1.1. Introduction Typical of traditional opinion with respect to the properties of English word stress are Daniel Jones's remarks that [generally speaking there are no rules determining which syllable or syllables of polysyllabic English words bear the stress (1956: 248). On the other hand since Chomsky & Halle's (1968) ex-tremely elaborate analysis of the stress system of this language, most phonolo-gists proceed from the opposite assumption, which has been formulated as follows by Halle & Keyser, in their 1971 summary: (1) Central to this account is the discovery made in Sound Pattern that in the overwhelming majority of instances stress in contemporary Eng-lish is governed by reasonably simple general rules, the most crucial of which, the Main Stress Rule, resembles rather strikingly the rule governing stress in Latin words. [...] The demonstration in Sound Pattern of English leaves little room for doubt that stress is predictable in contemporary English, and we know of no arguments from any quarter that might invalidate this claim in any way. (1971: xiii—iv) In this section we summarize the main characteristics of the stress system of English, based on the two accounts just mentioned, on subsequent core litera-ture, such as that mentioned above, and additional language-particular litera- Wordstress in Germanic languages 4 7 9 ture such as Hayes (1982), Kiparsky (1979, 1982), Selkirk (1980, 1984), and Kager (1989).
eBook - PDFWord Stress
Theoretical and Typological Issues
- Harry van der Hulst(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
While the extensive stress- marking of English might serve as a practical reference point for comparison with other potential stress systems, the fact that so much of the system has been lexicalized does not make it a good candidate for prototypicality. Instead, an attempt to define what might be a ‘canonical’ stress system is provided in (10) below. 60 Larry M. Hyman of stress across languages? What is the relative perceptibility of the different acoustic correlates of stress-marking across languages? What is the range of structural rules assigning stress across languages? All of this assumes that we know stress when we see/hear it. In Hyman (2006: 231, 2009: 217), the following, generally accepted, definition of stress was presented: (7) A language with stress-accent is one in which there is an indication of word-level metrical structure meeting the following two central criteria: a. obligatoriness (OblHead): every lexical word has at least one syllable marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence (primary stress); b. culminativity (CulmHead): every lexical word has at most one syllable marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence. (8) In addition to meeting both of these criteria, another inviolable property of stress systems is that the stress-bearing unit is the syllable . . . (Hyman 2009: 217) As a result of combining the properties in (7a, b), every lexical word must have one and only one (primary) stress, the prosodic head of that word. The above seems to be a very workable definition characterizing a common and recognizable prosodic type known as stress-accent. (8) further specifies that the stress-bearing unit must be the syllable (cf. Hayes 1995: 49). As a definition, (7) and (8) represent a minimum that any system must meet in order to be stress-accent.
eBook - PDFIntonation, Accent and Rhythm
Studies in Discourse Phonology
- Dafydd Gibbon, Helmut Richter, Dafydd Gibbon, Helmut Richter(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
1 This research was supported by a grant from the Science and Engineering Research Coun-cil, U. K., to the University of Sussex. 78 A. Cutler Stress Word stress patterns are an integral part of the phonological representa-tion of words in the mental lexicon; they are not generated by rule. Al-though it can be shown that speakers possess general knowledge of the stress patterns of their language — they can assign appropriate stress pat-terns to new derivations (splendidijy) or nonsense words (porpitude), for in-stance, by analogy to other words they know — nevertheless there is ade-quate evidence that in the process of language production, stress patterns are not assigned to each word by application of general rules, but are re-trieved along with the rest of the pronunciation of the word when the word is looked up in the mental lexicon. This evidence is provided, for example, by the guesses which speakers offer when they can't remember a word but have it on the tip of their tongue (see e.g. Brown & McNeill, 1966). A speaker searching for the name Ghirardelli, for instance, produced the guesses Garibaldi, Gabrielli and Granatelli (Browman, 1978) — all of them words with some sounds in common with the target word, chiefly initial and terminal sounds; but cru-cially, all of them words with the same number of syllables and stress pat-tern as Ghirardelli. Brown and McNeill proposed that the lexical entries of infrequently used words could become faint with disuse, so that only parts could be clearly read - perhaps the beginning and the end, but often the number of syllables and the location of primary stress. This argument pre-supposes that stress patterns are listed in the lexicon. Evidence from slips of the tongue in spontaneous speech provides a similar picture.
eBook - PDF- Donka Minkova(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
284 9 The evolution of the English stress system 1 ALWAYS - CAUSEWAYS , PRÉSENT , N . - PRESÉNT , V . HARÁSS ~ HÁRASS This chapter shifts the focus from segmental histories to the history of word- and phrasal stress in English. We first define some terms used in the description of the prosodic patterns of speech and revisit (see 2.3) the ways in which syllable structure and syllable weight interact and influence the assignment of stress. A brief sketch of the patterns of stress assignment in PDE is followed by notes on the methodology of pro-sodic reconstruction. Sections 9.4–9.6 turn to the description of Old and Middle English word- and phrasal stress. The last two sections discuss the effect of lexical borrowing from French and Latin on the prosody of English and some interesting prosodic changes in post-Renaissance English. 9.1 Preliminaries: definition of some terms It is customary in linguistics to approach phonological issues from two angles: the study of individual segments, or segmental phonology, or the study of prosodic structures. The term ‘prosody’, as used here, refers to the ‘suprasegmental’ domain of linguistic description and anal-ysis, attending to the properties of individual segments only if relevant to the structure and function of higher-level units, such as syllables. Very importantly, syllables are the carriers of ‘stress’, the contrastive intensity that marks some syllables as more or less prominent. The term ‘accent’ can also be used with reference to syllable prominence, so an ‘unaccented syllable’ and an ‘unstressed syllable’ can be synonymous. : The goal of prosodic description is to identify the properties and the organisation of syllables into words, phrases and utterances in speech. This area of inquiry is also referred to as ‘metrical phonology’.
eBook - PDFThe Study of Word Stress and Accent
Theories, Methods and Data
- Rob Goedemans, Jeffrey Heinz, Harry van der Hulst(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
By making this move we minimize the terminological problems and focus on the typology of how languages privilege phonological properties and their realization by position. 2 The Problem Despite the extraordinary amount of research on the subject, a number of issues continue to plague the study of stress and accent. On the conceptual side there is the question of what counts as “stress” or “accent.” In earlier work I attempted to clarify what should be identified as “stress-accent” by imposing the following requirements (Hyman 2006: 231): (1) A language with stress-accent is one in which there is an indication of word-level metrical structure meeting the following two central criteria: a. obligatoriness (OBLHEAD): every lexical word has AT LEAST one syllable marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence (primary stress) b. culminativity (CULMHEAD): every lexical word has AT MOST one syllable marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence Therefore: Every lexical word must have ONE AND ONLY ONE (primary) stress Besides limiting these properties to the word domain, explicit in both of these criteria is that the stress-bearing unit is the syllable (cf. Hayes 1995: 49, Hyman 2009: 217). Thus, I cited the culminative H(igh) tone of Somali as violating the criteria in (1) in two senses: first, the H is not assigned by syllable, but rather restrictively appears on either the penultimate or the final mora of the word, sometimes assigned as an exponent of the morphology: 1 (2) a. masculine feminine ínan ‘boy’ inán ‘girl’ qaálin ‘young m. camel’ qaalín ‘young f. camel’ daméer ‘he-donkey’ dameér ‘she-donkey’ b.
eBook - PDFThe Structure of Spoken Language
Intonation in Romance
- Philippe Martin(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
6 Lexical stress in Romance languages One of the key features in the description of sentence intonation in Romance languages other than French resides in the location of lexical stress. Indeed, whether in the Autosegmental-Metrical or Incremental Storage- Concatenation models, the metrically strong or stressed syllables are the places in the stress groups where prosodic events are located. In the AM model, lexical stress simply defines the location of pitch accents, which plays no role in the indication of the prosodic structure (Frota, 2009; Feldhausen, 2010). In the ISC model, however, prosodic characteristics function also as indicators of the prosodic structure, together with boundary tones. Stress and accent Many approaches and models relate the placement of stress in Romance languages to some phonological characteristics of the syllable. However, with two very simple principles based on a stress rule in Latin and morpholo- gical properties of the Romance language considered, it is possible to under- stand and predict its position in most cases. In this regard, metrical theory leads to rather strange conclusions, not really fit for Romance languages. The obstinacy of some researchers to stick to syllabic properties to infer stress placement rules may constitute a school case in this academic domain. The general principle, valid for all Romance languages (except French) and already proposed by Paul Garde (1968, 2013), relies on the morphological analysis of lexical words into an optional prefixes, a stem, and optional suffixes and inflections: (Prefix) + Stem + (Suffix) + … + (Suffix) + (Inflection) + … + (Inflection) The stress rule is based on the notion of stressability, i.e. the possibility for a syllable to be stressed. The stem is always stressable, and if derived from Latin, its potential stress location is predictable from the original Latin stress according to a simple rule given below. Suffixes and inflections are either 120
eBook - PDF- Carlos Gussenhoven, Natasha Warner, Carlos Gussenhoven, Natasha Warner(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In Spanish, by contrast, stress is largely unpredict-able and falls on one of the word's last three syllables (Navarro Tomás, 1965). Hence, utterances neither begin nor end consistently with a main stressed syllable. Neither utterance edge thus presents a regular surface stress pattern, and infants therefore decide to 208 Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux keep stress in the phonological representation. Finally, in section 2.3 we will see cases in which infants might fail to deduce that stress is non-contrastive; this concerns languages in which the stress regularity is harder to extract from one of the utterance edges than in French. Before going in detail into the predictions of our framework, though, we will spell out various assumptions that underlie our proposal. 2.2 Background assumptions First of all, we assume that utterance edges are easily attended to by young infants. This is an uncontroversial claim, since utterance edges are typically signaled by pauses in the discourse and/or by universal prosodie markers such as final lengthening. Experimen-tal evidence that infants can segment speech into utterances is pro-vided by Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler-Nelson, Jusczyk, Wright Cassidy, Druss & Kennedy (1987). Stress can be instantiated by a variety of phonetic cues, i.e. duration, pitch, and energy (Lehiste, 1970). Our second assump-tion is that infants can perceive word stress categorically by the time they come to fix the Stress Parameter. This is a relatively strong assumption, since there is no one-to-one correspondence between the abstract notion of linguistic stress and the three pho-netic cues. On the one hand, the relative weighting of these three cues in the realization of stress is language-specific. For instance, in languages with contrastive vowel length, duration is used to a lesser extent than pitch and energy; and in languages with lexical tone, pitch is avoided as a stress cue (Hayes, 1995).
eBook - PDFThe Pronunciation of English
A Course Book
- Charles W. Kreidler(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Lingua , 34: 1–29. Anderson, Stephen R. 1974. The Organization of Phonology . New York: Seminar Press. Anderson, R. 1995. Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Arnold, G. F. 1957. Stress in English words. Lingua , 6: 221–67. Bailey, Charles-James N. 1968. Dialectal differences in the syllabication of non-nasal sonorants in American English. General Linguistics , 8: 79–91. ——— 1973. Variation and Linguistic Theory . Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics. ——— 1980. Evidence for variable syllable boundaries in English. In Waugh, L. R., and Schooneveld, C. H. (eds.). The Melody of Language . Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 25–39. Bailey, Richard W., and Görlach, Manfred (eds.). 1982. English as a World Language . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bailey, Richard W., and Robinson, Jay L. (eds.). 1973. Varieties of Present-Day English . New York: Macmillan. Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English Word Formation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Alan, and Hooper, Joan Bybee (eds.). 1978a. Syllables and Segments . Amsterdam: North Holland. ——— 1978b. Issues and evidence in syllabic phonology. In: Bell and Hooper 1978a: 3–22. Berger, Marshall D. 1968. Accent, pattern, and dialect in North American English. Word , 24: 55–61. Berko, Jean. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word , 14: 150–77. Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bing, Janet M. 1980. Aspects of English Prosody . Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. ——— 1983. Contrastive stress, contrastive intonation and contrastive meaning. Journal of Semantics , 2: 141–56. Bibliography 297 Bloomfield, Leonard. 1935. The stressed vowels of American English. Language , 11: 97– 116. Bolinger, Dwight L. 1958. A theory of word accent in English. Word , 14: 109–48. ——— 1961a. Contrastive accent and contrastive stress.
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