Lecture 7. Word stress

1. Word stress, its acoustic nature.

2. The linguistic function of a word stress.

3. Degree and position of a word stress.

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The sequence of syllables in the word is not pronounced identically. The syllable or syllables which are pronounced with more prominence than the other syllables of the word are said to be stressed or accented. The correlation of varying prominences of syllables in a word is understood as the accentual structure of the word.

According to A.C. Gimson, the effect of prominence is achieved by any or all of four factors: force, tone, length and vowel colour. The dynamic stress implies greater force with which the syllable is pronounced. In other words in the articulation of the stressed syllable greater muscular energy is produced by the speaker. The European languages such as English, German, French, Russian are believed to possess predominantly dynamic word stress. In Scandinavian languages the word stress is considered to be both dynamic and musical (e.g. in Swedish, the word komma (comma) is distinguished from the word komma (come) by a difference in tones). The musical (tonic) word stress is observed in Chinese, Japanese. It is effected by the variations of the voice pitch in relation to neighbouring syllables. In Chinese the sound sequence “chu” pronounced with the level tone means “pig”, with the rising tone “bamboo”, and with the falling tone “to live”.

It is fair to mention that there is a terminological confusion in discussing the nature of stress. According to D. Crystal, the terms “heaviness, intensity, amplitude, prominence, emphasis, accent, stress” tend to be used synonymously by most writers. The discrepancy in terminology is largely due to the fact that there are 2 major views depending on whether the productive or receptive aspects of stress are discussed.

The main drawback with any theory of stress based on production of speech is that it only gives a partial explanation of the phenomenon but does not analyze it on the perceptive level.

Instrumental investigations study the physical nature of word stress. On the acoustic level the counterpart of force is the intensity of the vibrations of the vocal cords of the speaker which is perceived by the listener as loudness. Thus the greater energy with which the speaker articulates the stressed syllable in the word is associated by the listener with greater loudness. The acoustic counterparts of voice pitch and length are frequency and duration respectively. The nature of word stress in Russian seems to differ from that in English. The quantitative component plays a greater role in Russian accentual structure than in English word accent. In the Russian language of full formation and full length in unstressed positions, they are always reduced. Therefore the vowels of full length are unmistakably perceived as stressed. In English the quantitative component of word stress is not of primary importance because of the non-reduced vowels in the unstressed syllables which sometimes occur in English words (e.g. “transport”, “architect”).

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In discussing accentual structure of English words we should turn now to the functional aspect of word stress. In language the word stress performs 3 functions:

1) constitutive – word stress constitutes a word, it organizes the syllables of a word into a language unit. A word does not exist without the word stress. Thus the function is constitutive – sound continuum becomes a phrase when it is divided into units organized by word stress into words.

2) Word stress enables a person to identify a succession of syllables as a definite accentual pattern of a word. This function is known as identificatory (or recognitive).

3) Word stress alone is capable of differentiating the meaning of words or their forms, thus performing its distinctive function. The accentual patterns of words or the degrees of word stress and their positions form oppositions (“/import – im /port”, “/present – pre /sent”).

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There are actually as many degrees of word stress in a word as there are syllables. The British linguists usually distinguish three degrees of stress in the word. The primary stress is the strongest (e.g. exami/nation), the secondary stress is the second strongest one (e.g. ex,ami/nation). All the other degrees are termed “weak stress”. Unstressed syllables are supposed to have weak stress. The American scholars, B. Bloch and J. Trager, find 4 contrastive degrees of word stress: locid, reduced locid, medial and weak.

In Germanic languages the word stress originally fell on the initial syllable or the second syllable, the root syllable in the English words with prefixes. This tendency was called recessive. Most English words of Anglo-Saxon origin as well as the French borrowings are subjected to this recessive tendency.

Languages are also differentiated according to the placement of word stress. The traditional classification of languages concerning the place of stress in a word is into those with a fixed stress and a free stress. In languages with a fixed stress the occurrence of the word stress is limited to a particular syllable in a multisyllabic word. For example, in French the stress falls on the last syllable of the word (if pronounced in isolation), in Finnish and Czech it is fixed on the first syllable.

Some borrowed words retain their stress.

In languages with a free stress its place is not confined to a specific position in the word. The free placement of stress is exemplified in the English and Russian languages

(e.g. E. appetite – begin – examination

R. озеро – погода – молоко)

The word stress in English as well as in Russian is not only free but it may also be shifting performing semantic function of differentiating lexical units, parts of speech, grammatical forms. It is worth noting that in English word stress is used as a means of word-building (e.g. /contrast – con/trast, /music – mu /sician).

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