Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

3. Notation

Naturally, linguists all over the world wishing to study language from the phonetic perspective required to develop their own system of notation to transcribe words, denote rising and falling tones and mark varying degrees of stress within words and sentences. While Kingdon and Fudge differ in terminology, they both use three basic stress marks to indicate the placement of stress within a word, all of which are placed before the syllable they indicate as bearing the given stress:
` which Kingdon (1958) calls the Kinetic Tone Mark (p. 4) indicates the placement of the primary/main, i.e. the strongest stress in a word, as can be seen for example in a`bout, `current or con`tribute.
ˈ which Kingdon (1958) calls the High Level Tone Mark (p. 4) represents the secondary stresses within a word. There may be multiple instances of these within a word, but they always must come before the primary stress as can be seen in enˈcyclo`paedia or ˈun`ethical.
Lastly there is the ˌ symbol Low Level Tone Mark in Kingdon (1958, p. 5) which indicates other syllables with a certain degree of prominence. These do not stand out in the word, but usually can be recognized by the fact that they do not undergo vowel reduction. This can often be used to differentiate between words which, if the reduction occurred, would be impossible to distinguish in speech (e.g. `eˌxorˌcise compared to `exerˌcise).

4. English Stress System

The issue of stress patterns, that is, the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in the given word and the types of stresses used, in English is unfortunately extremely complicated. Kingdon (1958) himself admits that the field of English word stress is practically unexplored due to the fact that many believe it follows no rules whatsoever (p. xi). This is caused mainly by the fact that the English vocabulary has been taken and combined from Germanic and Romanic sources (Kingdon, 1958, p. 12). Regretfully for the English language, Germanic languages have the tendency to place stress on the earlier syllables of a word, whereas Romanic languages gravitate towards later word stress. Thus English stress is being etymologically pulled in two different directions, tending towards having some sort of full stress on one of the initial syllables while also being strongly influenced by presence of various suffixes. While in English the alignment of word stress within a given word is usually constant, the rules that the placement of word stress follows are highly complex as a result of the language’s mixed origin and are consequently difficult to understand for an English learner (contrasting for example with Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Welsh, where the stress is placed on a fixed syllable). Due to this complex and confusing system, English second language teaching on primary and secondary schools only rarely focuses on the correct placement of stresses, since it would generally mean that the students would have to memorize the stress placement for each individual word without being told why it is placed the way it is. Emphasis is thus put on the correct pronunciation of words, with the hope that stress placement will be acquired with frequent use of the word in listening exercises and conversations.
Because of the complexity of word stress placement patterns, there have been various approaches to the explanation of the issue by various scholars. While Kingdon (1958) approaches the issue more from a case-to-case point of view, and describes in-depth the influence compounds, various prefixes and suffixes etc. on the placement of stress, Chomsky and Halle (1968) reject his “suffix-based” explanation as unnecessary and take a more general approach, deriving the placement of word stresses by the segmental makeup of a word (division into clusters beginning with a vowel and ending before the next vowel, differentiation of tense and lax vowels) as well as its internal structure, i.e. whether a word can be divided into smaller parts and what relations hold between these. They develop a cyclical principle, where certain rules apply in certain order first to the word root and then to the next larger constituent until the cycle arrives at the end of the word. Thus in the word theatricality, the primary stress is first applied to the first syllable of `theatre, then to ˈthe`atrical, placing the primary stress on the antepenultimate syllable and reducing the other stresses by one degree and finally to the antepenultimate syllable of ˌtheˈatri`cality, again reducing the other stresses by one degree. Fudge’s approach (1984), the approach which will be explained in greater detail in this chapter and its subchapters, takes a bit of both systems. While it modifies Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) concept of tense and lax vowels, instead applying the concept of strong and weak syllables, it rejects their cyclic principle and accepts Kingdon’s (1958) suffix-based approach and his explanation of stress placement in compound words. It is important to emphasize, however, that few of the rules introduced in this thesis and in Fudge’s, or indeed any stress system are absolute: to most of them, there exists a number of exception which will not be covered in this thesis due to the fact that, as exceptions tend to, they cannot be systemized and must be learned one by one.
In the system described by Fudge (1984), the basic thing necessary to determine the placement of stress within a word in Fudge’s system is to first find the stressable portion (SP) of the word. The SP is what is left of the word once certain stress-neutral suffixes and prefixes (i.e. suffixes and prefixes which do not influence stress placement) have been removed from it. These suffixes include all inflectional suffixes i.e. plural form suffixes -s or -es and possessive form’s -‘s in nouns, comparative -er and superlative -est in adjectives, 3<sup>rd</sup> person singular -s, -es, past tense/participle -ed, past participle -en and present participle/gerund -ing forms in verbs. In addition to these, forty-eight derivational suffixes are also excluded from the SP. Twenty of these, however, are so called mixed suffixes (marked (m) in the list below) meaning they can fall into different suffix categories in regards to stress placement depending on the types of words they appear in. It is also important to note that certain suffixes, while similar in form, may have differing meanings and therefore fall into different categories. These shall be further specified in parenthesis. The complete list of stress-neutral suffixes is as follows:
-able (m), -acy (m), -age (m), -al (stress-neutral in noun-forming use, e.g. peruse - perusal), -ance (m), -ant (m) (noun-forming use; is stress-neutral only when coupled with a free stem i.e. a stem that can stand by itself e.g. account - accountant), -ary (m), -ce, -cy, -dom, -en, -er (m) (agent-noun-forming use; stress-neutral when coupled with a free stem e.g. fly - flyer), -er (abstract-noun-forming use e.g. disclaim - disclaimer), -ery (m), -ess, -ful, -hood, -ier (m), -iour, -ise (verb-forming use, e.g. energy - energise)/-ize (m), -ish, -ism (m), -ist (m), -ite (m) (noun-forming use in words meaning native of x or supporter of x; stress-neutral only when coupled with free stems e.g. Jacob - Jacobite), -less, -let, -ly, -ment (m), -ness (abstract-noun-forming use; stress-neutral only when coupled with free stem, e.g. ugly - ugliness), -or (m) (agent-noun-forming use; stress-neutral only when coupled with free stem e.g. confess - confessor), -ory (m), -ous (m), -ry, -s, -some, -t (m), -th, -ty, -ure (m), -ward, -ways, -wise, -y (adjective-forming use, e.g. rain - rainy), -y (m) (noun-forming use; stress-neutral only when coupled with a non-compound free stem e.g. baker - bakery).
Also a number of derivational prefixes is excluded from the stressable portion, most notably negative prefixes a-, an-, il-, im-, in-, ir- and un-, as well as the locative prefix a- (e.g. abroad, astray), reversive prefix dis- and causative prefixes em- and en-. Completing the list are prefixes be- (e.g. belittle), co-, de-, ex-, mal-, mis- and re-. Thus if we were to strip the word unfavourably, singing or friendliness to their SP’s, we would get favourab, sing and friend.
If a word’s SP is monosyllabic, the single syllable bears the stress. Thus the stress in the word sing, singing or any other of its forms is always on the first syllable (`singing) just as it is in the word `friend, `friendly, `friendliness etc. (thus, due to the lack of stress the vowel in the suffix –ness is always reduced to ə).
If the SP is polysyllabic but contains no prefixes or suffixes, main stress will be placed as follows:

1. 
   if the SP is disyllabic, stress is usually penultimate (`favour)
   
2. 
   if the SP is trisyllabic or longer, its stress is either penultimate or antepenultimate following these rules:
   
   1. 
      if the final syllable is strong, stress falls two syllables back from it, i.e. three syllables from the end of the SP of the word (e.g. `asterisk)
      
   2. 
      if the final syllable is weak then:
      
      1. 
         if the penultimate syllable is strong, it is stressed
         
      2. 
         if the penultimate syllable is weak, then the syllable before it is stressed
         

Points 2.1 and 2.2 deserve further explanation.
For a student to be able to distinguish between weak and strong syllables, they must first understand the structure of a syllable. A syllable generally consists of a vowel portion called the peak of the syllable. This portion may sometimes be occupied by a consonant instead of a vowel, most commonly by a nasal such as m or n (as in sudden, where the “e” is usually not pronounced in the second syllable [sʌ.dn]) or a liquid such as l or r. Often this “missing” vowel is present in the spelling of the word and for phonological purposes it is best to treat the syllable as if it contained the vowel. Before the peak, there is a string of consonants within the syllable called the onset. This may include anything from zero (e.g. ice) to three members (strength) in English. After the peak, there is again a string of consonants called the coda of the syllable which in English may contain zero to four consonants. It is important to note that the boundaries of syllables do not necessarily have to represent the boundaries of words (e.g. “at all” is phonetically transcribed as a single word: [ə.tɔ:l]). Using the abovementioned terminology, a weak syllable is defined as a syllable with a short vowel in its peak and no coda or in case of word-final syllables a coda consisting of up to consonants. All other syllables are strong, i.e. syllables which contain a long vowel in the peak, or syllables with a short vowel peak but a coda of at least one consonant in non-word-final syllables, or a coda of two or more consonants in case of word-final syllables. It is important to emphasize that these distinctions are made on the basis of phonemic representation. Therefore for example combinations of two letters which represent single sounds such as ck in “lock” count as single consonants for the purpose of determining syllable strength. Of course, there are exceptions such as the consonant combination ng which always counts as two consonants, or r which counts as a consonant even though it may not be pronounced as one.
Using the abovementioned rules, let us now analyze the word cranberry as an example: the SP of the word is trisyllabic [kræn.bə.rɪ], thus it falls under the rule 2. The final syllable of the word is weak because it includes a short vowel in its peak and has an empty coda, thus it falls under the rule 2.2. Its penultimate syllable is also weak since it contains a short vowel (shwa) in its peak and has an empty coda, thus it falls under the rule 2.2.a and it will bear antepenultimate stress: `cranberry.
In longer words, some of the syllables preceding the one with main stress can be more prominent than neighbouring syllables (same is not the case with syllables after the main stress). These carry the secondary stress within a word. If there is only one syllable before the one bearing main stress, there will be no secondary stress within the word as in be`fore. If there are two syllables before the one with main stress, the secondary stress is always placed onto the first one. In case there are three or more syllables before the one which bears main stress, then the syllable quality must be taken into consideration. If there is a strong syllable two syllables back from the syllable with main stress, it takes secondary stress. If the syllable two syllables back from main stress is weak, then the syllable before it takes secondary stress.