English Word Stress and Speech Rhythm Patterns

Syllable Weight and Lexical Stress Prediction

Syllable weight is important in the prediction of English lexical stress because the syllable that will always be stressed will be heavy. A heavy syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two consonants, where the first consonant belongs to the same syllable as the vowel.

Secondary Stress Rules

If the primary stress is on the third syllable or later, there will be a secondary stress two syllables before it. Examples include:

• ,Super'sede
• ,curi'osity
• ,eco'nomic
• ,continu'ation

Compound Nouns vs. Syntactic Units

In terms of meaning, you cannot infer the meaning of Compound Nouns (CN) by their components, whereas you can with Syntactic Units (SU). For example:

• Rédneck: A reactionary person (US).
• Réd néck: A neck that is red in color (e.g., burnt by the sun).

This happens because many CNs are completely lexicalized forms; they are treated as if they were monomorphemic and become institutionalized and fossilized.

Stress Patterns and the Interruptability Test

Regarding stress patterns, in CNs, the stress will usually be placed on the first component, whereas in SUs, both components will be stressed (e.g., rédneck vs. réd néck). CNs are normally stressed on the first part because the second component lost its stress throughout history. Nevertheless, some CNs are double-stressed, such as tóp hát.

If in doubt as to whether a particular form is a compound noun or a syntactic unit, we can make use of the interruptability test. We ask ourselves: "Can we interpolate another word between the components?" For example, évening dress must be a compound because we cannot say *evening silk dress.

Speech Rhythm and Phonetic Feet

Rhythm is the regularity or irregularity of prominent sounds in speech. It is produced by a number of factors. First, there is the speed at which the speaker delivers their message. Then, more importantly, there is the fact that some syllables are heard as more prominent than others.

In English, this is because these syllables are produced more forcefully than others: there is a greater muscular effort in their articulation, and more air is expelled from the lungs when they are enunciated. Rhythm is measured in rhythm units or feet. These are units consisting of one strongly stressed syllable and the unstressed syllables (though the two clauses in our sentence have unstressed leading syllables, which we naturally group with the following strong stress).

Isochrony: Stress-Timed vs. Syllable-Timed

Isochrony is the regularity of time in the occurrence of stress (the degree of force with which a sound or a syllable is uttered) within an utterance. English is a stress-timed language, which means that it has a regular occurrence of stress and an irregular syllable length. Conversely, Spanish is a syllable-timed language, which means that it has an irregular occurrence of stress but a regular syllable length.