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Particle + Verb = Noun compounds bear initial stress (`upˌrise).
Partice/Adverb + Verb + -er = Noun compounds are initial stressed (`outˌrunner).
Noun + like = Adjective compounds are initial stressed (`ladyˌlike).
4.4 Rhythm and Stress-Timing
Moving further upwards from the level of words and compounds, we arrive at the sentence/utterance level of the language. Phonetically, the boundaries of individual words may disappear as they are chained together in a rapid succession of syllables. Within this stream of syllables, the most semantically important words stand out the most (bear sentence stress) by virtue of the syllables bearing primary stress within the given word becoming more prominent than those within words which do not bear sentence stress. Or rather, the stressed syllables of less important words become less prominent or reduced in comparison to those of the important words. Thus in a sentence “I have not played the guitar this week”, depending on the context, any one of the words I, not, played, guitar, this or week can bear primary sentence stress if the circumstances permit it. Words which would not usually bear stress individually (mostly monosyllabic prepositions, conjunctions, particles (except in phrasal verbs), forms of the verb “to be”, pronouns and other function words) can bear sentence stress in the correct context (I’m sure he `was a soldier but he is not anymore) while monosyllabic words which would bear multiple stresses of varying strength can be so reduced in prominence that their primary stress can reach the strength of another word’s secondary or low level stress. (Kingdon, 1958, p. 1)
The stretches between the most prominent stresses within a sentence are called stress groups (Fudge, 1984, p. 1) or phonetic words. When analyzing an English sentence in this manner, there is a noticeable tendency for these strong stresses of an utterance to occur at more or less predictable and regular periods of time, producing a rhythm. The prominent syllables within a sentence tend to be prolonged, while the less prominent syllables tend to be shortened and reduced, one being followed by another in a very rapid succession in spoken language. Thus while the word “him” is in isolation pronounced hɪm, in a sentence in which it does not bear special importance, it will be pronounced as ɪm due to lack of stress.
The tendency described above makes English one of the stress-timed languages (such as German or Swedish), since stresses within a sentence occur at approximately equal intervals of time. Naturally, the English rhythm must not be taken literally, as the regularity of intervals between stressed syllables is only approximate and relative (Roach, 1992, p. 120). This stands in contrast to the so called syllable-timed languages such as French, Finnish, Vietnamese or Czech, which instead of basing their timing on stress put emphasis on having individual syllables occur at approximately even periods of time. Consequently, this stress-timing tendency makes the already complex studies of stress even more puzzling, since though words individually do bear stress on always the same syllable (except for contrastive or otherwise emphatic context) when put together in a sentence their stresses may change not only depending on their importance but also depending on their surroundings.
Due to the fact that English is a stress-timed language, there is a tendency for strong stresses not to occur on adjacent syllables but rather be separated by at least one unstressed syllable. This causes various stress shifts within the spoken language. For example, while the word nineteen bears main stress on the second syllable (ˈnine`teen), in the phrase “nineteen feet” the word bears stress on its first syllable (`nineˌteen `feet) since stressing the second syllable would cause the two strong stresses to neighbour each other. This phenomenon can quite often be observed on the case of final stressed compounds used as adjectives before a noun (e.g. ˈblood-`red v. `blood-ˌred `wine).
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