Questions tagged [stress]

Emphasis given to a syllable relative to other syllables.

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How can Kisserberth's idea of conspiracy is applicable in the generative explanation of word stress rules of a language X?

I am struggling to understand how can Kisserberth's concept of conspiracy is applicable in the generative explanation of word stress rules of a particular language X? Now, if we refer to Kager's (...
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Why do nouns typically have their main stress on the penultimate while verbs on the ultimate (according to theories other than that of Hayes)?

I'm working on English stress acquisition by non-native speakers for my Master's Thesis. According to the theories of Hayes (1981) and, subsequently, Halle & Vergnaud (1987), extrametricality (i.e....
ludovikbt's user avatar
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How can we represent a stressed monosyllabic word?

According to Wiktionary, in Chinese, the word 是 means "truly; indeed" when it is stressed. However, according to Wikipedia, it appears that the concept of word stress is not applicable to a ...
siffleur's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
390 views

In English, how exactly does intonation reflect stress?

I have not read this book, just googling my question. Although most naive native listeners feel that stress has something to do with loudness (as indeed it can, but not necessarily so), the main ...
stupid's user avatar
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Phonemic transcriptions for English compound words

I have a question about the phonemic transcription for compound words in English. Is there a general rule? Specifically, Should there be space/hyphen/no space between each element in a compound? How ...
amai's user avatar
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Is there a term for words differing in stress (only)?

That is words that is pronunced equally except the stress pattern differs. For example "digest /daɪˈdʒɛst/" (verb) and "digest /ˈdaɪdʒɛst/" (noun). Or even the case where the ...
skyking's user avatar
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Do some languages use lexical stress to differentiate words with unrelated meanings?

In English, lexical stress is occasionally used to differentiate words with the same consonant and vowel phonemes and that have related meanings. (Please forgive the incomplete definitions.) re ˈpeat ...
James Grossmann's user avatar
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History and Reason of Portuguese accentuation marks

What is the background of having rules for marking the accentuated syllables in Portuguese? For example the word "tecnológica" is a proparoxytone, and all of these words must have a graphic ...
Bernardo Benini Fantin's user avatar
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3 answers
240 views

Where does phonemic stress come from?

Why did some languages develop phonemic stress but others did not? Based on cursory Google searches, English and Russian have phonemic stress, but not Icelandic. English is far more closely related to ...
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What's the difference between primary and secondary stresses?

I've heard that secondary stress is more weaker than primary stress but aside from that is there any noticeable difference the two kinds of stresses?
LinguisticsFanatic's user avatar
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How do you write the phonological rule for if something occurs before a stressed syllable?

I have the notion that /t/ and /th/ (aspirated [t]) are complementary allophones. How would I write the rule that an aspirated t occurs at the beginning of a word and the beginning of a stressed ...
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In Russian, why can a multisyllabic second declension noun stressed on the last syllable not get a plural in -а?

There are a few hundred nouns of the second declension in Russian that do not have a nominative plural in the expected -ы but rather in -а, e.g. город-города. This ending is also invariably stressed. ...
Kasper's user avatar
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How can I recognize the placement of stress in a word/syllable?

My native language is Georgian and ever since I got interested in linguistics and learned about the existence of stress I've tried to to recognize where it falls in a syllable but whenever I try to ...
LinguisticsFanatic's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
402 views

Do sentences have primary and secondary stresses?

I know that stress can shift in an English phrase or sentence to emphasize the words that mean more specifically what the speaker wishes to express, however I'm talking about the general stress where ...
Zoltan King's user avatar
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1 answer
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Is there an IPA symbol to represent both primary or secondary stress?

I was just wondering if there is an IPA symbol to represent stress in general, be that primary or secondary stress, just one symbol for both?
Zoltan King's user avatar
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What kind of stress is this?

I found the word "ice-free" is pronounced /ˈˌaɪsˈˌfri/ in Oxford English Dictionary, but what kind of stress is this? Should it be called 'there are two primary stresses and two secondary ...
ronghe's user avatar
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When teaching word stress to ESL students, is it worth teaching secondary stress placement?

I often incorporate stress training into my classes as it is very important for intelligibility (as better awareness of stress placement will give students clearer speaking and better listening skills)...
CuriousTeacher's user avatar
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What are the stress-distinguished minimal pairs in English?

I already know of two non-homograph ones: insight and billow. Insight /ˈɪnsʌɪt/ is phonemically identical to incite /ɪn'sʌɪt/ except for where the stress falls (first syllable in insight, second ...
minseong's user avatar
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Are there terms for homophones that vary by syllabic emphasis?

Is there a technical term for words that have the same phonemes but are distinguished by syllabic emphasis? E.g., abstract is æb-strækt, but emphasis on the first syllable is a different word from ...
feetwet's user avatar
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What are the differences of word stress, lexical stress and metrical stress?

It is said lexical stress is word stress, but I don't understand why they named it differently.
user33927's user avatar
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Resources on stress, tone and pitch evolution

I am interested in the stress, tone and pitch (STP) aspects of historical linguistics. How do phonetic and other types of changes affect STP changes? How do languages end up with entirely different ...
Selewirre's user avatar
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The affixation differentiating between nominal arithmetic and adjectival arithmetic

Since a suprafix can be the change of stress somewhere in the word (or other suprasegmental elements), and since accentuation plays a role in differentiating the noun arithmetic from the adjective ...
A. Kvåle's user avatar
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In English the suffix sometimes changes the stress pattern of the rest of the word. Is English the only language with this system?

TELephone, telePHONic, teLEphony. PHOTograph, photoGRAphic,photOgraphy. biOLogy, bioLOGical. The suffix changes the stress pattern of the rest of the word. Is English the only language with this ...
Matthew Christopher Bartsh's user avatar
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What does linguistics call sets of words with the same spelling, different (but perhaps related) meaning, and different emphasized syllables?

In my idiolect, the word "defense", with the emphasis on the first syllable means "the role of defending". With the emphasis on the second syllable, it means "the act of ...
Scott Deerwester's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
171 views

Vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious'

I came across a question on English Language & Usage asking about why the vowels in the second syllable of 'harmonic' and 'harmonious' are pronounced differently. Harmonic → /hɑːˈmɒn.ɪk/ ...
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Moraic vs Non-Moraic Codas

What determines a coda to be moraic or non-moraic relative to stress? I am a little confused about this.
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Stress bearing suffixes in Optimality Theory

Stress bearing suffixes in English words like Chinese, Japanese, cigarette, fifteen violate the non-finality constraint. Can anyone explain what other constraints outrank non-finality and allows the ...
Mellifluous's user avatar
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5 votes
1 answer
181 views

Is increased loudness a necessary characteristic of the stress in Russian?

According to wikipedia's definition of stress: That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. In ...
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Is there a principled reason behind differing compound verb stress in English?

Is there a principled difference between compound verbs in English with stress on the first root and those with stress on the second root? First root stress compound verbs: Dropkick Spoonfeed ...
user28639's user avatar
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Why does IPA have stress in /ɡəˈʃtɔlt/ before instead of after the /ʃ/?

Why does IPA have stress here /ɡəˈʃtɔlt/ instead of here /ɡəʃˈtɔlt/?
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Do stressed (in e.g. English) or pitched (in e.g. Japanese) phones contribute to different phonemes?

In proper tonal languages such as cantonese or mandarin, the phones a phoneme comprises of share the same tone. In other words, mā (in pinyin) and má are clearly different phonemes. If I were to look ...
Ell's user avatar
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39 votes
4 answers
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?

Suppose someone asked me the question, "Have you completed the project?". A standard response would be "I have". Why does the equivalent "I've" sound so strange and never used as a replacement? I am ...
The Monkey's user avatar
2 votes
3 answers
716 views

Do all languages use emphasis to communicate importance?

So, I was just writing a sentence along the lines of "...the sales person will not enter the information....". I went back and wrote it as "...the sales person will not enter the information...." to ...
DBWeinstein's user avatar
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How are LH words assigned stress in Latin if we assume maximally bimoraic feet?

I recently came across a paper, "The Quantitative Trochee in Latin" (by R. Armin Mester, 1994) that seems to argue that feet in Latin were "strictly" bimoraic. The arguments that Mester gives for ...
brass tacks's user avatar
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9 votes
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How did Latin get its stress pattern?

As far as I know, Latin had a word-initial accent for some time of its history after losing the Indo-European accent. I am wondering why Latin then switched to an ante-/pen-ultima stress pattern.
unknown_person_1000's user avatar
5 votes
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305 views

'Interstitial' tones in Thai

You don't have to listen to authentic Thai for very long to realize that comparatively few words are pronounced with the dictionary tone. All the learning material out there seems to be focused on ...
user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
241 views

The rule of location of stress in English verbs

There are three sets of verbs to point out the location of stress, which are: (Bold implies stress) A => exit B => exist C => improve, surprise C - consonant / V - Vowel According to this data, ...
Yanek Yuk's user avatar
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Different ways to interpret stressed words in a sentence

I'm reading an introductory book on syntax and one of the exercises says to discuss the interpretations which the italicized expression can have in the given sentences and to give an appropriate ...
lmc's user avatar
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Accurately representing stress

Wondering how to accurately represent stress. In IPA, stress, is marked with ˈ◌. But in languages like Spanish (don't know of other languages that use acute accent, other than Ancient Greek), you have ...
Lance's user avatar
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Types of "stress" in language

Wondering what are all the different kinds of "stress" (so to speak) in any language. I just found out about Prosodic Stress which is pretty cool. I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else ...
Lance's user avatar
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0 votes
2 answers
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Example of stress or tone on a consonant

Wondering if there is such thing as stress on a consonant, e.g. t́, ĺ, ḿ, ś, ʃ́... If so, what the example language would be. I haven't seen any on Wikipedia. Same thing for tone, I haven't seen ...
Lance's user avatar
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1 vote
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769 views

Does syntactic stress exist?

From what I know, stress can only be assigned at the level of the word (as in English) or the level of the sentence (as in French). Can any natural language assign it syntactically, e.g., "the first ...
Robert C.'s user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
2k views

Sentence stress detection

I was looking for APIs for the detection of sentence stress, also known as prosodic stress, based on input audio. (Ideally, I was hoping for a library able to assess the level of prominence of a ...
Fabien Snauwaert's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
146 views

Measuring phonetic correlates of stress (intensity in particular)

It's normal enough for people to say that we can attribute the percept of 'stress accent' to certain acoustic correlates – usually higher relative fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration of ...
Peter Nyhuis Torres's user avatar
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1 answer
172 views

What does "directionality of footing" mean?

How do we understand if the foot construction is Right to Left or Left to Right? Does it have to do with the head of the foot? For example, in a trochee (the head is leftmost in the foot), is the ...
V.Lydia's user avatar
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Does the scope of negation change when there is a stressed word within a sentence?

For example, in the sentence ‘your daughter don’t hate school’, the scope of negation would be entire sentence. However if 'your' is phonologically stressed like 'YOUR daughter don't hate school', ...
user21022's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
588 views

Do a classification of words with two or more stressed syllables exist?

In phonology, words can be classified according to the position of the stressed syllable: An oxytone word is a word stressed in the last syllable. A paroxytone word is a word stressed in the second ...
Charlie's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
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What is the linguistic cause of the formation of "competete" a wrong variant of "compete"?

Competete a variant of Compete used in colloquial speech, but is written with the same spelling as the latter, has come into use (at the least) in Indian English variants if in no other English ...
WiccanKarnak's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
266 views

"split into" -- putting the stress on the right syllable

I heard a non-native speaker of English saying something would be "split into". After a fraction of a second I realized that what was intended was "split in two". The difference appears to be that ...
Michael Hardy's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
255 views

Is there a known reason for the position of the stress in "concupisc-" words in English?

The words concúpiscent, concúpiscence, concúpiscible seem to be irregularly stressed (at least, according to their dictionary pronunciations; regularized pronunciations apparently have been heard "in ...
brass tacks's user avatar
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