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

Syntactic stress
A small number of languages use word-stress in a syntactic function, to distinguish between different grammatical roles taken up by words in sentences. Brosnahan and Malmberg (1970: 158) cite Bendor-Samuel's (1962) investigations of the Southwest Brazilian language Terena, where stress-placement is used: to distinguish the subject from the object in a verb in an independent clause as kuti otopiko 'who chopped?' but kuti otopiko 'what did he chop?'; to mark certain sequences of independent clauses in coordinative relationship as tokoponu namukonu 'he found me, took me' in comparison with tokoponu namukonu 'he found and took me'; to mark the verb introduced by a sequence particle as ina aunkopovo 'then I returned home' in comparison with aunkopovo 'I returned home'; and so on.
Nature of Word Stress
Closely connected with the syllabic structure of words is their accentual structure, because it is the syllable that bears what is known as word-stress or word accent. It is important to become aware of the number of syllables in a word. Every disyJ!abic and polysyllabic word pronounced in isolation has word-stress. Word accent in a disyllabic or polysyllabic word may be defined as a singling out of one or more of its syllables by giving them a greater degree of prominence as compared wilh lhe other syllable or syllables in the same word.
Note: In the word 'indivisibility ['mdl, VIZI'bIhhl consisting of seven syllables, we make the first, third and fifth syllables prominent by the same means, but the degrees of their prominence are different.
The s(rc'ss on the fifth syllable is effected chiefly by a change in pitch direction. This syllable is called the accentual nucleus of the word and the stress on it, the primary (nuclcilr) accent.
, The stress on the tirst syllable is also primary, but it is effected by pronouncing the syllable on a high level pitch. This syllable bears the pre-nuclear primary accent.
Levels of stress
Up to this point we have talked about stress as though there were a simple distinction between “stressed” and “unstressed” syllables with no intermediate levels; such a treatment would be a two-level analysis of stress.

CHAPTER 2 STRESS IN COMPOUND WORDS AND WORD COMBINATIONS.

2.1 WORD STRESS AND ITS TYPES

The spoken language has a unique division into segments like vowels and consonants. As we utter them, we make use of wide range of tones of voice. The speech features that are higher than the sound segments are length, stress, pitch, intonation, rhythm and juncture. Here we are describing the nature of word stress.

The sequence of syllables in the word is not pronounced identically. The syllable or syllables which are uttered with more prominence than the other syllables of the word are said to be stressed or accented. Stress in the isolated word is termed word stress; stress in connected speech is termed sentence stress.
At first we have to find out the meaning of the notions: word stress, intonation, accent. "Different authors define stress differently. B.A. Bogoroditsky, for instance, defined stress as an increase of energy, accompanied by an increase of expiratory and articulatory activity. D. Jones defined word stress as the degree of force, which is accompanied by a strong force of exhalation and gives an impression of loudness. H. Sweet also stated that stress, is connected with the force of breath. According to A.C. Gimson, any or all of four factors achieve the effect of prominence: force, tone, length and vowel color.
For native English listeners, the most important syllable in a word is the stressed syllable, the primary cue for identifying the word. This makes stress the most important pronunciation topic. In addition, the characteristics of stressed and unstressed syllables in single words are mirrored in rhythm. Word stress is described as a communicatively important pronunciation topic, bridging the continuum between segmentals (consonants and vowels) and suprasegmentals (rhythm and intonation)".
Strelnikov A.M. suggested another description. He states that "the word stress can be defined as the singling out of one or more syllables in а word, which is accompanied by the change of the force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the vowel sound".
Still the most full and correct definition can be found in the Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. "A term used in phonetics to refer to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. The usual distinction is between stressed and unstressed syllables, the former being more prominent than the latter (and marked in transcription with a raised vertical line, [c]. The prominence is usually due to an increase in loudness of the stressed syllable, but increases in length and often pitch may contribute to the overall impression of prominence. In popular usage, `stress' is usually equated with an undifferentiated notion of `emphasis' or `strength'".
The notion of stress is supposed to close enough to the meaning of intonation. Still there exists a huge difference. The difference between stress and intonation is that " …stress is the relative loudness of parts of speech where intonation is the variation in the pitch of different parts of speech. Linguists generally believe that there are about 3 to 4 levels of stress in the English language. In most cases, stress does not really change the meaning of words and is more or less associated with the dialect or accent being used.
Although Loudness has an inherent pitch component, stress, as the relative loudness, sometimes has an added pitch variation. This extra pitch variation is called a pitch accent. An example of a language, which contains a pronounced level of pitch accent is Turkish. Pitch variations are used to change the stress level of a word mostly due to rhythmic constraints imposed by the language.
As long as we are discussing the notion of accent, it is reasonable to define its meaning. Accent was originally a loan translation from Greek into Latin (a loan translation is when each constituent of a compound in one language is translated into its equivalent in another, and then reassembled into a new compound). " … Greek prosфidiв (whence English prosody) was formed from pros `to' and фidй `song' (whence English ode); these elements were translated into Latin ad `to' and cantus `song' (whence English chant, cant, cantata, canticle), giving accentus. The notion underlying this combination of `to' and `song' was of a song added to speech - that is, the intonation of spoken language. The sense of a particular mode of pronunciation did not arise in English until the 16th century".
In the Britannica Encyclopedia exists the following meaning of the accent notion. " … in phonetics, that property of a syllable which makes it stand out in an utterance relative to its neighboring syllables. The emphasis on the accented syllable, relative to the unaccented syllables may be realized through greater length, higher or lower pitch, a changing pitch contour, greater loudness or a combination of these characteristics" [10;54].
"The emphasis which makes a particular word or syllable stand out in a stream of speech - one talks especially of an accented sound/word/syllable, or the accent(ual) pattern of a phrase/sentence. The term is usually found in a discussion of metre (metrics), where it refers to the `beats' in a line of poetry - the accented syllables, as opposed to the unaccented ones. But any style of spoken language could be described with reference to the relative weight (accentuation) of its syllables: one might talk of the `strongly accented' speech of a politician, for instance.
Technically, accent is not solely a matter of loudness, but also of pitch and duration, especially pitch: comparing the verb record (as in I'm going to record the tune) and the noun (I've got a record), the contrast in word accent between re`cord and `record is made by the syllables differing in loudness, length and pitch movement. The notion of pitch accent as also been used in the phonological analysis of these languages, referring to cases where there is a restricted distribution of tone within words (as in Japanese). A similar use of these variables is found in the notion of sentence accent (also called `contrastive accent'). This is an important aspect of linguistic analysis, especially of intonation, because it can affect the acceptability, the meaning, or the presuppositions of a sentence, e.g. He was wearing a red hat could be heard as a response to Was he wearing a red coat?; whereas He was wearing a red hat would respond to Was he wearing a green hat? The term stress, however, is often used for contrasts of this kind (as in the phrases `word stress' and `contrastive stress'). An analysis in terms of pitch accent is also possible.
The total system of accents in a language is sometimes called the accentual system, and would be part of the study of phonology. The coinage accentology for the study of accents is sometimes found in European linguistics. (3) In graphology, an accent is a mark placed above a letter, showing how that letter is to be pronounced. French accents, for example, include a distinction between e, e and e. Accents are a type of diacritic" [13; 4].

Most linguists believe that syllabic and lexical accents do not change the meaning of words in English. However, we know that syllabic and lexical accents are also components of linguistic stress along with other concepts such as syllabic and lexical sonority variations and metrical variations. In those regards, since syllabic stress does change the meaning of words in English, then so do accent.