Stress in compounds and phrases.

THEORY OF PHONETICS (Correspondence Department)

Seminar No 2

WORD STRESS

Points for Study

Word stress tendencies.

English word stress functions.

Word accentual patterns.

Stress in compounds and phrases.

▓ WORD STRESS TENDENCIES

In spite of the fact that word stress in English is free, there are certain factors that determine the location and different degree of it. Prof. V. A. Vassilyev describes them as follows:

• the recessive tendency;

• the rhythmic tendency;

• the retentive tendencyand

• the semantic factor.

The first and the oldest of the English lexical stress tendencies (characteristic of all Germanic languages) is known as the recessive tendencyand originally consisted in placing lexical stress on the initial syllable of nouns, adjectives and verbs derived from them and on the root syllable of words which belonged to other parts of speech and had a prefix. In most cases prefixes lost their referential meaning since then, with the result that recessive stress in present-day English has two subtypes:

1) unrestricted:when stress falls on the initial syllable, provided it is not a prefix which has no referential meaning. A great majority of native English words of Germanic origin are stressed this way: 'father, 'mother, 'husband, 'wonder.

2) restricted:when stress falls on the root of the native English words with a prefix which has no referential meaning now: a'mong, be'come, be'fore, for'get, etc.

It is this tendency that determined the incidence of stress in a huge number of disyllabic and trisyllabic French words which had been borrowed into English until the 15^th century (during and after the Norman Conquest).

The presence in English of a great number of short (disyllabic and trisyllabic) words defined the development of the so-called rhythmic tendencywhich results in alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Borrowed polysyllabic words developed a secondary stress on the syllable separated from the word-final primary stress by one unstressed syllable. These words began to be pronounced, in isolation, on the model of short phrases in which a stressed syllable alternates with an unstressed one: pronunciation /prə‚nΔnsı 'eı∫n/.

The retentive tendencyconsists in the retention of the primary stress on the parent word: 'person - 'personal, or more commonly the retention of the secondary stress on the parent word: 'personal—‚perso'nality. The difference between constant accent and the retentive stress consists in that the former remains on the same syllable in all the grammatical forms of a word or in all the derivatives from one and the same root, whereas retentive stress in a derivative falls on the same syllable on which it falls in the parent word, while in other derivatives from the same root it may be shifted, e.g.: 'person -'personal -per'sonify.

There are certain categories of English words stressing of which is determined by the semantic factor,e.g. compound words and words with the so-called separable prefixes. The majority of such words have two equally strong stresses, both stressed parts are considered to be of equal semantic importance, with the semantic factor thus canceling the rhythmic tendency in word stressing, e.g.

• compound adjectives:hard-working, blue-eyed,

• verbs with post positions (phrasal verbs).- sit down, take off,

• numerals from 13 to 19:fourteen, sixteen.

▓ ENGLISH WORD STRESS FUNCTIONS

Word stress in a language performs the following functions:

1. The CONSTITUTIVE function:it organizes the syllables of a word into a language unit having a definite accentual structure, i.e. a pattern of relationship among the syllables. The word does not exist as a lexical unit without word stress.

2. The IDENTIFICATORY function:correct lexical stress enables the listener to decode the information in verbal communication adequately, while misplaced word stresses prevent understanding.

3. The DISTINCTIVE/CONTRASTIVE function:word stress alone is capable of differentiating the meanings of words or their forms. There are about 135 pairs of words of identical orthography in English which could occur either as nouns (with stress on the penultimate syllable) or as verbs (with stress on the final syllable): 'import (noun) - im'port (verb), 'insult (noun) - in'sult (verb).

Table 1. Orthographically identical word-pairs in English differentiated by word-stress as nouns (penultimate stress) or verbs (ultimate stress)

▓ WORD ACCENTUAL PATTERNS

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 2478