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The Accentual Structure of English

The greater degree of special prominence given to one or more syllables as compared with that of the other syllable or syllables in one and the same word is known as word accent.

When the inherent prominence of one speech sound, especially a vowel, is equal to or greater than that of the other sounds in the same word, the accent given to the syllable containing this sound increases its prominence. For instance, in the word /instiŋkt/ both [i]-sounds have equal inherent prominence but the actual, accentual prominence of the first [i] is greater than that of the second. Therefore this word is said to be accented on the first syllable.

Monosyllabic words pronounced as vocabulary items in isolation are considered to have word accent.

Types of word accent are distinguished first of all according to the articulatory means by which it is effected.

 One of such means is the pronunciation of a syllable in a word with that of the other syllables of the same word. Word accent effected by this means is called dynamic, or force, stress.

 A syllable can be made specially prominent by uttering it on a different pitch level or with a different pitch direction than the other syllable or syllables of the word. Word accent effected by this means is called musical, or pitch, or tonic.

 A syllable becomes more prominent when its vowel is pronounced longer than another vowel or other vowels of the same tamber or historical length in the unstressed position in the same word or in other words of the language. Word accent by this means is called quantitative.

 Qualitative accent is effected by preserving unobscured the quality of the vowel phoneme in the accented syllable.

It is generally believed that each of the existing languages has either force stress or pitch accent or both at the same time as principal phonologically relevant types with the remaining types as concomitant or incidental ones. Word accent in European languages, as English, French, Russian, is traditionally considered to be predominantly dynamic, with different degrees of the force of uttering a stressed syllable.

From a purely phonetic point of view a polysyllabic word has as many degrees of stress as there are syllables in it.

2 5 3 6 1 7 4

/indivizi‘biliti/,

where 1- is the strongest syllable, 2 is the second strongest, etc. They distinguish three degrees of word-stress. The strongest stress is called primary, the second strongest secondary, while the rest degrees of stress are grouped together under the cover term of weak stress. The syllables bearing either primary or secondary stress are termed stressed, while syllables with weak stress are called unstressed.

Different linguists designate by different terms the same degrees of stress and sometimes allocate different degrees of stress to the same syllable. Some write that English stress can completely described in form of four contrasting grades: loud, reduced loud, medial and weak. The others distinguish primary stress, secondary, tertiary and weak. The contradiction is due to the fact that they do not discriminate between word accent, phrase accent and sentence accent. The factors determining the degree of stress, or accent, which a word has in a sentence are more varied than the factors determining the degree of stress in a word pronounced in isolation. The semantic factor determines the position of ‘logical stress’. The pitch pattern of a word or a free word combination in a sentence is also determined by the presence of stressed syllables before or after it and by the speaker’s emotion.

Different types of word accent are distinguished not only according to its nature or degree, but also according to its position, place or incidence. From this point of view two types of word accent are distinguished: (1) fixed and (2) free. Within free word accent two subtypes are distinguished on morphological grounds: (1) constant accent and (2) shifting accent. A constant accent is one which remains on the same root. For instance, such case forms wonder, wonderful, wonderfully. A shifting accent is one which falls on different grammatical forms of a word or in different derivatives from one and the same root. This term is also referred to the word accent which is shifted from one syllable to another or used in reference to one of the two word accents which is retained while the other one disappears under the influence of the rhythm of word combinations: Berlin [b∂׃‘lin], but Berlin streets [‘b∂׃lin ‘stri׃ts].

Word accent in English is free but the ‘freedom’ of its incidence is restricted by certain tendencies which make the incidence of word more predictable. The first and the oldest tendency is the recessive one, which is characteristic of all Germanic languages. It has two subtypes – unrestricted and restricted. The first falls on the initial syllable, provided it is not a prefix which has no referential meaning now. It is this accent which is observed in the great majority of native English words of this type, e.g. father, mother, wonder, husband, etc. Restricted recessive stress falls on the root of native English words with a prefix which has no referential meaning now, e.g. among, before, forget, withstand, etc.

Disyllabic and trisyl¬labic French words underwent in English what is known as accentual assimilation. The accent in them originally fell, as in Modern French, on the last syllable, but under the strong influence of the native English tendency to recessive stress it began to shift gradually to the initial syllable. In Modern English all the disyllabic and trisyllabic words have only recessive stress, e.g. colour, marriage. Borrowed words with prefixes which have no referential meaning now have restricted recessive stress, e.g. conduct, produce, surprise.

The presence in English of a great number of short words has caused the development of one more tendency in the incidence of word accent. This is the so-called rhythmic tendency, while the accent determined by it is called rhythmical. The result of this tendency is that the overwhelming majority of three- and four-syllable words with one accent are stressed on the third syllable from the end.

The accentuation of words ending in the suffix –ion with its variants -sion, -tion is akso rhythmical in its origin and has developed in the same way as the accentuation of the words like radical, family.

Strictly speaking, the stress in these words is rhythmical only in its origin, because in present-day English there is no rhythmical alteration of a stressed syllable with an unstressed one in such words, e.g. family, colony, although the final syllable still remains stronger than the preceding one. In order to reflect the historical origin of this stress it may be called historically, or diachronically, rhythmical.

A relatively small group of English words have interidiolectal (individual) free accentual variants both in RP and GA. Thus, some people say ´hospitable (with recessive stress), whereas others say, equally correctly, hos´pitable; ´formidable and for´midable.

The tendency arose to keep the accentual pattern, and the pronunciation in general, of newly borrowed words the same as they were in the language they from which they were borrowed. The reason for this lay in the new channels through which borrowings began to be made – not by people from the actual speakers of the strange language in the process of everyday contacts with them, as the case was during the Norman Conquest, but second-hand, so to speak, through the educated members of the nation who knew foreign languages.

There is a third tendency clearly distinguishable in English word accentuation. It is a manifestation of constant accent in word derivation. This tendency is called retentive. It is the tendency to retain the accent in a derivative on the same syllable on which it falls in the original, parent, word, i.e. the word from which a derivative is immediately formed. person – personally.

The difference between constant and retentive accent consists in that rhe former remains on the same syllable in all the grammatical forms of a word or in all the derivatives from one and the same root, whereas retentive stress in a derivative falls on the same syllable on which it falls in the parent word, while in other derivatives from the same root it may be shifted: person-personal-personality.

Like the recessive tendency, the retentive tendency is in conflict with the rhythmic one. In some words the outcome of the struggle is that the retentive tendency counteracts and cancels the rhythmic one, in others the opposite is the case. the rhythmic tendency wins in those cases when the result of the retentive tendency would be the occurence of two stressed syllables in succession, which is quite contrary to the rhythmic tendency. For example, the noun from con´verse should, according to the retentive tendency, have the secondary stress on the vowel [∂׃] but since this would contradict the rhythmic tendency, the secondary stress is shifted to the preceding syllable.

A peculiar feature of English is the existence in it of certain categories of words in whose accentuation the crucial determining factor is the semantic one. These are words with the so-called separable prefixes, i.e. those which have a distinct referential meaning of their own, and compound words. The majority of these classes of words have two equally strong stresses, the so-called