Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

Masaryk University
Faculty of Arts


Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Marek Bednář


Stress Patterns in English and Czech:
The Systems, the Conflicts and their Impact on Second Language Education
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………………………
Author’s signature

Acknowledgement:

I would like to thank my supervisor PhDr. Kateřina Tomková, Ph.D. for her encouragement and valuable advice and help.
Table of Contents

1. Introduction 5
2. What are Stress Patterns? 7
3. Notation 9
4. English Stress System 10
4.1 Influence of Suffixes 15
4.2 Influence of Prefixes 17
4.3 Stress in Compounds 19
4.4 Rhythm and Stress-Timing 22
4.5 Presence v. Absence of Stress and Influence on Vowel Quality 24
5. Czech Stress System and its Conflicts with English 30
6. Grammar School Survey Analysis 33
Conclusion 41
Works Cited 43
Appendix 1 44

1. Introduction

The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the topic of similarities and conflicts between the English and Czech stress system and examining the impact of these on the second language education. The issue of stress patterns and its importance will be first described on a theoretical level, before proceeding to the practical section of the thesis – testing via recordings how or whether secondary school students recognize stress in a spoken text and are able to identify stressing mistakes.
It is the author’s goal to prove that the importance of adhering to correct stress patterns should not be underestimated and should even be one of the main focuses of second language teaching and learning. In second language education, especially on primary and secondary schools, the emphasis is oftentimes placed on the correct pronunciation of words and syllables, and the issue of correct stress placement within the word or within the sentence is largely ignored. The primary purpose of second language education is, naturally, enabling the student to successfully communicate in a foreign language. To this end, students of foreign languages are taught grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation as these are seen as the main contributors to the students’ ability to communicate intelligibly. The author, however, argues that correct stress placement plays a vital role in speaker’s intelligibility, and that mastering English stress patterns and eliminating incorrect stress placements taken from the mother tongue should be among the primary goals of second language learning.
In his research the author made use of books dealing with theoretical aspects of stress patterns in both of the chosen languages and has also conducted a survey with students of English an unnamed secondary school. The results of the survey will subsequently be analyzed in the practical section of the thesis to see how well students recognize English stress and whether the current teaching system provides sufficient background in this area of English language.
As the theoretical background for this work, Erik Fudge’s English word-stress (1984) and Roger Kingdon’s The groundwork of English stress (1958) will be used as the principal sources as the The groundwork of English stress is suitable for the lay person and thus quite useful for the majority of the cases covered in my work. Though it does provide valuable explanations of phonetic issues, as well as definitions of various phonetic terms, its main worth lies in its coverage of theoretical cases one might encounter and complete listing of all possible stress patterns.
English word-stress (1984), which builds on Kingdon’s work to a certain extent, functions perfectly as a background for studies on tone, intonation, stress and pitch, provides explanations of the rules of stress placement and sufficient examples, and is therefore suitable for a student wanting to venture into the area of phonetics for the first time. Due to its all-encompassing, detailed and methodical approach, the majority of the theoretical section of this thesis will be focused on introducing Fudge’s system to the reader. However, this system will not be introduced in its entirety; emphasis will be put on transparent categorization and rule sets, readability, and logical arrangement. Minor simplifications or omissions of the more peripheral cases will be introduced only where necessary for better understandability to the reader.