Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

4.2 Influence of Prefixes

As mentioned before, some, quite productive, prefixes do not influence the placement of stress and are automatically excluded from the word’s SP (for a full list see page 12). These are the so called stress-neutral prefixes. The important thing to note is that although these prefixes may not influence the placement of stress, it does not mean that they cannot be stressed in certain circumstances. For example, if the prefixes are used contrastively (“I bet all my money on that driver and he lost! And it’s your fault.” “I said his success was highly UNlikely, not likely!”) they can bear main stress. Also, since these prefixes are removed from the SP of a word before stress placement is determined, they do not count towards the syllables of the word as far as stress placement is concerned. Therefore, even though the word “improper” is trisyllabic and with the last two syllables being weak should bear antepenultimate stress (`improper), due to the fact that the stress-neutral prefixes are removed from the SP, the word is treated as disyllabic and receives penultimate stress instead (im`proper).
However, there is also another group of prefixes called the stress-repellent prefixes. As the name suggests, these prefixes resist the stress being placed on them, instead they move the stress onto the syllable after the one the prefix appears in; however, it is important to emphasize that they reject only stress placed on them by the basic rules explained on page 13. If an SP of a word contains suffixes and its stress pattern is thus influenced by their presence, the stress-repellence of the prefix is negated. The stress-repellent prefixes can usually be differentiated from stress-neutral prefixes by the fact that they usually appear with bound stems and are less likely to have a constant meaning in all words they appear in (while for example the stress-neutral prefix un- always negates the meaning of the stem, while the prefix com- in compromise or command does not have a fixed meaning). There is generally speaking no need for a list of stress-repellent prefixes, as stress-repellence and stress-neutrality are the only possible relations prefixes can have towards stress. Therefore, if a prefix is not included among stress-neutral prefixes, it is automatically stress-repellent.
Some prefixes behave differently in regards to stress placement depending on whether they appear in a noun or a verb. For example, in the noun increase, the prefix in- is not stress-repellent, the word bears penultimate stress and is pronounced `ɪnkɾi:s while in the verb, the prefix is stress-repellent and the word is final stressed (ɪn`kɾi:s). Usually prefixes which form a weak syllable are stress repellent in both verbs and nouns; however there is a number of exceptions to this principle as can be seen in the example of re- in the noun-verb pair refuse (`refuse in noun but re`fuse in verb form). However, invariably, if the stem bears the stress in the noun, it will always bear stress in the verb as well (e.g. de`mand). In adjective-verb pairs, the prefixes in most cases behave the way they do in nouns as can be seen in e.g. ab`stract (verb) - `abstract (adjective, noun).