Tokar Stress Variation in English

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0043-4
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 50, 251 Seiten

Reihe: Language in Performance (LIP)

This monograph is concerned with the question of why some English words have more than one stress pattern. E.g., 'overt vs. o'vert, 'pulsate vs. pul'sate, etc. It is argued that cases such as these are due to the fact that the morphological structure of one and the same English word can sometimes be analyzed in more than one way. Thus, 'overt is the stress pattern of the suffixation analysis over + -t, whereas o'vert is due to the prefixation analysis o- + -vert (cf. covert). Similarly, pulsate is simultaneously pulse + -ate (i.e., a suffixed derivative) and a back-derivative from pul'satance.
'Tokar's approach in the use of both dictionary (OED) and corpus data (YouTube) holds promise of a scholarly breakthrough on the vital linguistic prosodic topic of English stress assignment of doublets and of stress assignment in general.' (Irmengard Rauch, Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley)

Dr. Alexander Tokar lehrte anglistische Sprachwissenschaft an der Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, der Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen und der Universität Siegen. Außerdem war er Gastwissenschaftler an der University of California at Berkeley (Department of Linguistics).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tokar, Alexander

Leseproben

1.1 Scope of the study
In addition to the obvious questions raised by variably-stressed words such as applicable and adult—1) What are the causes of stress variation exhibited by these and other English words with stress doublets? 2) Why do only some English words have stress doublets? 3) Do words with stress doublets prefer particular stress patterns and if so, why?—the present monograph will attempt to give a more precise answer to the general question of why English words (either with or without stress doublets) are stressed the way they are stressed. According to a popular view, Present-day English is a Latin-like language as far as its stress system is concerned (Hayes 1995: 181). Thus, since “[i]n the three hundred years that intervened between the Norman Conquest and Chaucer, the [English] language was inundated by Romance words” (Halle & Keyser 1971: 97), the stress rule of contemporary English is essentially the stress rule of Classical Latin: “Stress falls on the penultimate syllable if it contains a long vowel or is closed. […] Else stress is antepenultimate” (van der Hulst 2010a: 459). An illustration is the word paprika, which in British English, according to LDOCE, is interchangeably stressed /'pæpr?k?/ and /p?'pri?k?/. As one can notice, when stress in paprika is penultimate, the vowel in the penultimate syllable /'pri?/, which bears stress, is long. When, by contrast, paprika is pronounced /'pæpr?k?/, the vowel in the unstressed penult /pr?/ is short. The stress patterns /'pæpr?k?/ and /p?'pri?k?/ can thus both be said to be in accordance with the Latin Stress Rule. At the same time, however, in the case of the stress variation /'?kskw?z?t/ vs. /?k'skw?z?t/ (Oxford English Dictionary, henceforth OED), the vowel in the penultimate syllable remains short irrespective of whether stress in exquisite is penultimate or antepenultimate. Similarly, it does not matter whether stalactite and stalagmite are stressed pen- or antepenultimately. In both /'stælækta?t/ vs. /st?'lækta?t/ (OED) and /'stælægma?t/ vs. /st?'lægma?t/ (OED), there is a short vowel in the penult that is followed by a coda consonant, i.e., /læk/ and /læg/; stress in the trisyllables stalactite and stalagmite is thus supposed to be penultimate in accordance with the Latin Stress Rule. A fairly similar case is necropsy, for which the OED gives segmentally identical British English transcriptions /'n?kr?psi/ and /n?'kr?psi/: As one can notice, these transcriptions differ from each other only with regard to the location of the stress symbol ('). Similar examples can be found among disyllabic English words, which are not covered by the Latin Stress Rule, stating that “[i]n words with 2 or fewer syllables, primary stress occurs on the initial syllable” (StressTyp2 database), i.e., in contrast to a disyllabic English word, in which stress is either initial or final (e.g., /'æd?lt/ vs. /?'d?lt/ of adult), in a disyllabic Latin word, stress can only be initial, i.e., Words with a heavy penultimate syllable receive penultimate stress, words with a light penult receive antepenultimate stress, and in all other cases where a word is too short to obey these laws, stress falls as far as possible to the left. (Hayes 1995: 50) According to van der Hulst (2010a: 445), in the English language “[p]rimary stress falls on the final syllable in nouns if the vowel is long, in verbs if the vowel is long or there are two closing consonants.” The diachronic basis of this assertion is the view, expressed in Halle & Keyser (1971: 99–101), that the stress system of contemporary English was shaped not only by Latin but also by (Old) French: The nonnative vocabulary of Chaucer consisted of two types of words, namely learned words largely of Latin origin and everyday words borrowed from Old French or Anglo-Norman. These two classes had different stress patterns. (Halle & Keyser 1971: 99) A convincing critique of this view can be found in Fournier (2007: 232), who argues that: French stress is not a central component of English stress, an analysis confirmed by history: most words of all lengths stressed on the final are relatively late borrowings, from the 17th century onwards. (Fournier 2007: 232; author’s italics) From a purely synchronic perspective, the view that final stress in English crucially depends upon the length of the vowel in the final syllable/the number of closing consonants when the vowel is short cannot be accepted because especially words with stress doublets provide too many counterexamples. For instance, for the verb migrate the OED gives segmentally identical British English transcriptions /m??'gre?t/ vs. /'m??gre?t/ and the American English transcription /'ma??gre?t/, i.e., migrate is always pronounced with a diphthong in the ult (which counts as a long vowel), but stress in migrate is not always final in Present-day English. A similar case is the adjective overt, for which LDOCE gives segmentally identical British English transcriptions /'??v??t/ vs. /??'v??t/ and American English transcriptions /'o?v??rt/ vs. /o?'v??rt/. The adjective under consideration is thus also always pronounced with a long vowel in the ult, even when stress in overt is non-final. The noun decade is interchangeably stressed /'deke?d/ and /de'ke?d/ (LDOCE), with both the stressed ult /'ke?d/ of the latter and the unstressed ult /ke?d/ of the former containing a diphthong. Of the 268 variably-stressed disyllables in LDOCE (including words such as caffeine, which, according to the dictionary, is stressed only /'kæfi?n/ in British English vs. only /kæ'fi?n/ in American English), 173 (~64.55 %) are disyllables such as caffeine, in which stress differences are not accompanied by segmental differences involving the quality of the vowel in the ult. Thus, if the ult bearing stress contains a long vowel or diphthong, then also the unstressed ult of an initially-stressed alternative pronunciation likewise contains a long vowel or diphthong (e.g., /kæ'fi?n/ vs. /'kæfi?n/ of caffeine). Similarly, if the ult bearing stress contains a short vowel, then (a qualitatively unreduced) short vowel also occurs in the ult of an initially-stressed alternative pronunciation. E.g., address is, according to LDOCE, only /?'dres/ in British English, but it is /?'dres/ vs. /'ædres/ in American English. The ult /res/, which contains a short vowel (being followed by only one coda consonant), thus occurs in both the finally-stressed pronunciation /?'dres/ and the initially-stressed alternative /'ædres/. (Notice, however, that in YouTube videos featuring the spoken occurrences of address, initial stress was heard by the author only in environments such as IP address or street address, whereas in contexts such as State of the Union Address, Gettysburg Address, inaugural address, commencement address, etc., where address expresses the meaning “public speech,” stress in address was exclusively final. The variation /?'dres/ vs. /'ædres/ is thus, at least in part, a matter of semantics.) Anyway, the fact that disyllables such as caffeine and address constitute the majority of variably-stressed disyllables in English strongly suggests that the quality of the vowel in the ult plays a relatively insignificant role in the assignment of stress in disyllabic English words. Another important number is that in Oxford Dictionaries (henceforth OD), there are 48,428...