Course paper the theme: stress in compound words and word combinations

Fixed lexical stress
The languages in Hyman's survey which showed predominantly fixed lexical stress location fall into strongly different proportions, depending on the syllable-placement chosen. The data show the following totals (Hyman 1977a: 41, 56):
306 languages with predominantly fixed lexical stress-placement

The relatively strong tendency (about 57 per cent) for languages to prefer
the trailing edge of words (final or penultimate syllable) for the location of fixed lexical stress is to some extent explainable by suggesting that such placement gives stress a demarcative function, indicating where the wordboundaries are without making the listener expend too much cognitive effort in calculating them. The same argument holds for initial syllable stress-placement at the leading edge of the word. The final, penultimate and initial syllable word-marginal positions together account for 94 per cent of the 306 languages with fixed-stress systems. A number of examples of words from languages with predominantly fixed lexical stress are given below. A case where the lexical stress obligatorily falls on the final syllable is Tatar, the Altaic language spoken in the central area of the Commonwealth of Independent States (Comrie 1981: 67), where it is the fifth largest language of the CIS. It is also spoken by some 4,000 speakers just across the border in the Xinjiang region of China.
Variable lexical stress
A relatively small proportion of the languages of the world allow a range of different locations of lexical stress. Examples of such languages using relatively free placement of stress include Assamese (Goswami 1966, cited in Masica 1991: 121, in a use of free lexical stress atypical of the other Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent); Dutch (V. van Heuven, personal communication); English (as discussed earlier) and Greek (Jones 1944); Italian (Vincent 1988: 284); Rumanian (Mallinson 1988: 392); Russian (Brosnahan and Malmberg 1970: 157); Spanish (Green 1988: 87); Swedish (Brosnahan and Malmberg 1970: 157), where its use on the final syllable excludes the use of the tonal accent mentioned in the preceding chapter; and Uzbek (in a few word-pairs, mentioned by Comrie 1981: 66 as exceptions to its general fixed-stress pattern):