Placement of stress within the word

We now come to a question that causes a great deal of difficulty, particularly to foreign learners (who cannot simply dismiss it as an academic question): how can one select the correct syllable or syllables to stress in an English word? As is well known, English is not one of those languages where word stress can be decided simply in relation to the syllables of the word, as can be done in French (where the last syllable is usually stressed), Polish (where the syllable before the last - the penultimate syllable - is usually stressed) or Czech (where the first syllable is usually stressed). Many writers have said that English word stress is so difficult to predict that it is best to treat stress placement as a property of the individual word, to be learned when the word itself is learned. Certainly anyone who tries to analyze English stress placement has to recognize that it is a highly complex matter. However, it must also be recognized that in most cases (though certainly not all), when English speakers come across an unfamiliar word, they can pronounce it with the correct stress; in principle, it should be possible to discover what it is that the English speaker knows and to write it in the form of rules. The following summary of ideas on stress placement in nouns, verbs and adjectives is an attempt to present a few rules in the simplest possible form. Nevertheless, practically all the rules have exceptions and readers may feel that the rules are so complex that it would be easier to go back to the idea of learning the stress for each word individually.

In order to decide on stress placement, it is necessary to make use of some or all of the following information:

i) Whether the word is morphologically simple, or whether it is complex as a result either of containing one or more affixes (i.e. prefixes or suffixes) or of being a compound word.

ii) What the grammatical category of the word is (noun, verb, adjective, etc.).

iii) How many syllables the word has.

iv) What the phonological structure of those syllables is.

It is sometimes difficult to make the decision referred to in (i). The rules for complex words are different from those for simple words and these will be dealt with later. Single- syllable words present no problems: if they are pronounced in isolation they are said with primary stress.

Point (iv) above is something that should be dealt with right away, since it affects many of the other rules that we will look at later. We saw that it is possible to divide syllables into two basic categories: strong and weak. One component of a syllable is the rhyme, which contains the syllable peak and the coda. A strong syllable has a rhyme with

either (i) a syllable peak which is a long vowel or diphthong, with or without a

following consonant (coda). Examples:

'die' daɪ           'heart' ha:t           'see' si:

or (ii) a syllable peak which is a short vowel, one of ɪ, e, æ, Λ, ɒ, ʊ, followed by at least one consonant. Examples:

'bat' baet             'much' mΛtʃ           'pull' pʊl

A weak syllable has a syllable peak which consists of one of the vowels æ, i, u and no coda except when the vowel is a. Syllabic consonants are also weak. Examples:

'fa' in 'sofa'               'səʊfə                    'zy' in 'lazy' 'leɪzi

'flu' in 'influence'    'influəns                'en' in 'sudden' 'sɑdn

The vowel I may also be the peak of a weak syllable if it occurs before a consonant that is initial in the syllable that follows it. Examples:

'bi' in 'herbicide'  'hз:bɪsaɪd                 'e' in 'event' ɪ'vent

(However, this vowel is also found frequently as the peak of stressed syllables, as in 'thinker' 'θɪŋkə, 'input' 'inpʊt.)

The important point to remember is that, although we do find unstressed strong syllables (as in the last syllable of 'dialect' 'daɪəlekt), only strong syllables can be stressed. Weak syllables are always unstressed. This piece of knowledge does not by any means solve all the problems of how to place English stress, but it does help in some cases.