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Linguistics

Notes ‘typewriter’ 'tawprawtc
‘car ferry’ 'kY+0feri
‘sunrise’ 's• nrawz
‘suitcase’ 'suitkews
‘teacup’ 'ti+k• p
It is probably safest to assume that stress will normally fall in this way on other compounds;
however, a number of compounds receive stress instead on the second element. The first words in
such compounds often have secondary stress. For example, compounds with an adjectival first
element and the -ed morpheme at the end have this pattern (given in spelling only):
/bad - 'tempered
/half-'timbered
/heavy-'handed
Compounds in which the first element is a number in some form also tend to have final stress:
/three-'wheeler
/second-'class
/five-'finger
Compounds functioning as adverbs are usually final-stressed:
/head'first
/North-'East
/down 'stream
Finally, compounds which function as verbs and have an adverbial first element take final stress:
/down 'grade
/back- 'pedal
/ill-'treat
26.6 Variable Stress

It would be wrong to imagine that the stress pattern is always fixed and unchanging in English
words. Stress position may vary for one of two reasons: either as a result of the stress on other
words occurring next to the word in question, or because not all speakers agree on the placement
of stress in some words. The former case is an aspect of connected speech that will be encountered
the main effect is that the stress on a final-stressed compound tends to move to a preceding
syllable and change to secondary stress if the following word begins with a strongly stressed
syllable. Thus (using some examples from the previous section):
/bad-'tempered but a /bad-tempered 'teacher
/half-'timbered but a /half-timbered 'house
/heavy-'handed but a /heavy-handed 'sentence
The second is not a serious problem, but is one that foreign learners should be aware of. A well-
known example is ‘controversy’, which is pronounced by some speakers as 'kZntrbvf+si and by
others as kbn'trZvbsi; it would be quite wrong to say that one version was correct and one incorrect.
Other examples of different possibilities are ‘ice cream’.

26.7 Word-Class Pairs
One aspect of word stress is best treated as a separate issue. There are several dozen pairs of two-
syllable words with identical spelling which differ from each other in stress placement, apparently
according to word class (nount, verb or adjective). All appear to consist of prefix + stem. We shall
treat them as a special type of word and give them the following rule: if a pair of prefix-plus-stem

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