Stress and Intonation

Stress is a cover term for the prosodic features of duration, intensity, and pitch; thus, the prominence of stressed syllables is generally manifested by their characteristics of being longer, louder, and higher in pitch than unstressed syllables. From the speaker’s point of view, this corresponds to the amount of effort expended, while from the hearer’s point of view, it is the perceptual prominence.

English has variable stress. It is characteristic of Germanic languages for any syllable in a polysyllabic word to be able to carry the stress. For example, in the following trisyllabic nouns, article, tomato, and kangaroo, the stress moves from the first to the second and then to the third syllable, respectively ([ɑ́ɹ̣tɪkl], [təméɾo], [kæŋgəɹ̣ú]).

In addition to variability, English stress is said to be mobile. This can be shown in morphologically related words in which the stress shifts on to different syllables:

Although the above discussion may suggest a highly variable and unpredictable situation, this does not mean that there are no rules or principles underlying the stress patterns of English. It should be noted, however, that these regularities are tendencies rather than airtight rules. It is a characteristic of English that the grammatical category or morphological structure of words frequently affects the stress patterns. The topic under discussion has been treated differently in different books and manuals. Some have detailed formulations to cover several exceptions, others present more practically oriented descriptions that are more general in nature. Some count syllables and do not make any distinctions among word classes, such as nouns and verbs; others separate word classes but do not count syllables. Each one of these approaches has certain benefits and drawbacks. The approach followed here will resemble several of those described in different respects.

We will first look at simple words and then examine the forms with affixes. There are difficulties regarding the description of stress patterns because of exceptions that are the results of events in the history of English. While many words retain their Germanic stress patterns, many others have been acquired through historical events; one such event is the Norman Conquest, which is responsible for the plethora of French vocabulary and Romance stress patterns. In addition, religion and scholarship have had significant influence in securing the original stress patterns of vocabulary from Greek and Latin.

In some books, in order to deal with certain exceptions, descriptions invoke some morphological parsing that will not be followed here. This is especially true for some so-called ‘prefixes’. For example, one might encounter the underlined portions of the following words, award, surprise, proposal, forget, obtain, admit, intend, compel, treated as prefixes. Some of these prefixes are of Germanic origin and others are of Latin origin. However, if we are interested in the description of present-day English, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to think that such separations are real for the users of the language because the non-prefix portions of the above, (a)ward, (sur)prise, etc., are not to be treated as existing roots.

Before we start our account of English stress, it will be useful to remember the conditions of a stressable syllable. Syllable weight is an important factor in stress assignment in that heavy syllables attract stress. The weight of a syllable is determined by its rhyme structure. If the rhyme is non-branching (a short vowel, and no coda), the syllable is light. If, on the other hand, the rhyme is branching (has a short vowel, except [ə], which is weight less and cannot carry stress, followed by a coda (simple or complex), or has a long vowel or a diphthong with or without a following coda), the syllable is heavy. It is also useful to define the terms ult (the last syllable), penult (the syllable before the ult), and antepenult (the syllable before the penult), which will be used for the location of the syllables in a word. These can be shown in the following word, probability: