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

Nuclear stress is a term used by generative phonology (e.g. in Chomsky and Halle 1968) for the location of greatest syllabic prominence on phrases. As such it has implications for intonational structure. The 'Nuclear Stress
Rule' in generative phonology, for example, is formulated to express the requirement in English that 'in a noun phrase primary stress is assigned to the last primary-stressed syllable (e.g a black board, a big University)' (Fischer-Jorgensen 1975: 246).
The function of emphatic stress is to call the listener's attention to a given syllable or word with greater insistence than is afforded merely by neutral patterns of intonation or lexical stress. In the case where intonation and lexical stress are neutral, with a falling nuclear tone being placed on the lexically stressed syllable of the last content word in the utterance, as in the English utterance The dog ate the biscuit, emphatic stress can be used to give special emphasis to this syllable, as in The dog ate the BIScuit, with a wider pitch excursion, greater loudness and possibly a longer duration for the realization of the vowel. The effect on the listener is then to convey that there is a particular reason for insisting on the identification of the word receiving emphatic stress (for instance, implying that it was 'not the bone'). A paralinguistic effect of emphatic stress can also be to signal the degree of intensity felt by the speaker about the topic under discussion, as in the French utterance C'est aTROCE 'it is atrocious' (Tranel 1987: 201). This element of insistence on the part of the speaker in the function of emphatic stress is reflected in the French translation of the phrase 'emphatic stress' as 'Paccent d'insistance' (Tranel 1987: 194).
Emphatic stress can also be used to highlight a syllable not normally
receiving lexical stress (i.e. on a syllable other than the normally wordaccented syllable), in order to draw the listener's attention to a choice made by the speaker between potentially competing forms. An example of emphatic stress in this function would be the pronunciations ENable and DISable instead of the normal en'able and disable, in the English utterance /said ENable, not DISable. Another example of placing stress on a syllable other than the normally word-accented syllable (in a compound word) would be the utterance He lives in SOUTH Dakota, insisting on an implied contrast with North Dakota (normally accented as 'North Da'kota'). In such cases the placement of the nuclear tone is also non-neutral.
An initial distinction was drawn above between two degrees of phonological stress, 'stressed' and 'unstressed'. But many phonologists set up not just two categories of stress in the syllables of a single word, but three - primary stress, secondary stress and unstressed. They point to the graded differences of prominence that characterize individual syllables in words in English such as ' resignation',' syste'matic',', introductory', "veto' and "anecdote' (using '" and 7 to indicate primary and secondary stress respectively). Differences in the distribution of primary and secondary stress can also typify different accents. Fromkin and Rodman (1974: 90) compare the word-stress patterns of American English laboratory, ([labsj.toji]) which shows both primary and secondary stress on the stressed syllables, with Received Pronunciation's laboratory ([ta'bDistn]), which uses only primary stress.
The contribution of segmental quality to lexical stress in English can be seen in a diminution of the relative degree of stress on a syllable by a process called vowel reduction (Lindblom 1963). This phonological process replaces a peripheral vowel with a more central vowel in unstressed syllables. The most frequent type of vowel reduction in English and other languages making use of this phonological process such as Russian and Swedish is the replacement of a more peripheral vowel by fa/. Possible pronunciations in English (RP) of the noun/verb pairs mentioned earlier, showing vowel reduction on the (unstressed) first syllable of the verb, would be:



Householder (1971: 268-9) investigated a very large corpus of everyday English, and found only 135 pairs of words of identical orthography which like these could occur either as nouns (with stress on the penultimate syllable) or as verbs (with stress on the final syllable). In a very small number of cases the location of lexical stress alone was the differentiating factor, as in 'import (noun) versus im'port (verb), and 'insult (noun) versus in'sult (verb). In these cases, pitch, loudness and duration alone were the phonetic parameters used to make the distinction. The very large majority of word-pairs, however, used vowel reduction as a manipulation of quality together with differences of pitch, loudness and duration to signal the difference of wordstress location. A selection of the words in Householder's list is given in table.
Some orthographically identical word-pairs in English differentiated by word-stress as nouns (penultimate stress) or verbs (final stress)

Most words in most languages that use stress linguistically do not enjoy partnership in minimal pairs based on stress, and in this sense stress cannot properly be said to be used in a contrastive function. It is said rather to show a culminative function, being a characteristic property of the word without normally contributing to contrastive paradigms (Martinet 1954). As such, this culminative property is thought to help the listener to judge how many individual words the speaker has produced in a given utterance.

1.2.TYPES OF STRESS