The stress in compound and polysyllabic words

CLASSIFICATION OF HEADS

The head is the element of the intonation group which starts with its first fully stressed syllable and stretches up to the nucleus

Heads can be classified acording to the following criteria:

• 
  general contour of the pitch movement over the head
  
• 
  pitch movement within the stressed (rhythmic) group
  
• 
  distribution of semantic prominence (the number of fully or partially stressed syllables in the head).
  

According to the general contour of the pitch movement heads can be grouped into Descending ( – the following stressed syllable(s) is(are) pronounced lower than the preceding ones)

Ascending ( – the following stressed syllable(s) is (are) higher than the preceding ones)

Level ( – all the stressed syllables are on the same level).

According to the pitch movement within the rhythmic groups heads are classified as

Stepping ( – the unstressed syllable(s) in each rhythmic group is (are) on the same level as the preceding stressed one).

Sliding ( – the unstressed syllable(s) is (are) pronounced lower than the preceding stressed ones).

Scandent ( – the untsressed syllable(s) is(are) pronounced higher than the preceding stressed ones)

According to the prominence distribution there are also three types of heads:

One-peak head – has only one fully stressed syllable;