ACCENTUAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH

ACCENTUAL STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH

While pronouncing words, we can distinguish syllables which are articulated
with different degrees of prominence. Syllables given a special degree of
prominence may occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of words. A
greater degree of prominence given to one or more syllables in a word which
singles it out through changes in the pitch and intensity of the voice and
results in qualitative and quantitative modifications of sounds in the accented
syllable is known as word accent.

Languages differ from each other in the principal means by which the
special prominence of speech sounds is achieved and word accent thus effected.
One of such means is the pronunciation of a syllable in a word with greater force
of utterance as compared with that of the other syllables of the same word. Word
accent effected by these means is called dynamic or force stress. 

A syllable can be made especially prominent by uttering each on a different pitch level than the
other syllable or syllables of the same word. Word accent effected by these means
is called musical or tonic accent. A syllable becomes more prominent when its
vowel is pronounced longer than another vowel or other vowels of the same
timbre. Word accent effected by these means is called quantitative accent. In
most languages stressed syllables are made prominent by the combination of
several all the above mentioned means. Scandinavian languages make use of both
dynamic stress and tonic accent in a more or less equal degree. 
Word accent in English, German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian is traditionally considered to be
predominantly dynamic. Some oriental languages such as Japanese, Chinese,
Vietnamese as well as some African languages are regarded as having exclusively
or predominantly tonic word accent. In Japanese the sound sequence [hana] when
said with even tone, means “nose”, when higher tone on the first syllable –
“beginning”, when higher tone on the last syllable – “flower”.

Recent investigations of the acoustic nature of word accent in English and
Russian have shown that word stress in these languages is effected rather by
creating a definite pattern of relationships among all the syllables of every
disyllabic or polysyllabic word. From a purely phonetic point of view a
polysyllabic word has as many degrees of stress as there are syllables in it. 
The majority of British phoneticians distinguish three degrees of stress in English.
They call the strongest stress primary, the second strongest stress – secondary,
while all the other degrees of stress are called weak. 
The distinction between secondary and tertiary stresses is very subtle. The result is that the discrimination of these two degrees of stress syllables in particular words is a subjective matter and even phonetically trained linguists sometimes differ from each other in this respect.

Different types of word accent are distinguished according to its position.
From this point of view we can speak about fixed (ліс – лісу) and free (рука –
руку) word accent. Fixed word accent is characterized by the fixed position of
stress (French, Italian, Polish, Latin). Free word accent is characterized by the fact
that in different words of the language different syllables are stressed. Free word
accent has two sub-types: constant which always remains on the same
morpheme in different grammar forms of a word or in different derivatives from
the same root (wonder, wonderful, wonderfully); shifting accent is one which falls
on different morphemes in different grammatical forms of a word or in derivatives
from one and the same root (history – historical; active – activity; вовк – вовки).
Accent performs three basic functions:
1) constitutive, because it organizes a word as a complicated sound unit;
2) recognitive, as it helps to recognize words;
3) distinctive for it helps to distinguish words and their grammar forms
(import – import; produce – produce; perfect – perfect). It also helps to
distinguish compound words from word-combinations. 

In spite of the fact that word accent in English is free, the freedom of its
incidence is restricted by certain factors that determine the place and different
degrees of word accent. 
1) recessive tendency (tending to move away) – results in placing the
word accent on the initial syllable under the influence of the
Germanic tendency to stress the first syllable. Many English words
are of the Germanic origin (Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian). E.g.
father, mother, brother. Under the influence of this tendency words
of the Romanic origin (French) illustrate this tendency as well;
2) rhythmical tendency has caused the appearance in borrowed words
of many syllables of a secondary stress separated from the word
final principal stress by one unstressed syllable. E.g. the word
“radical” was borrowed from French. Later the word received the
recessive stress. Gradually the stress on the last syllable began to
weaken because it was contrary to the strong English tendency to
place the word accent on the fist syllable. This is an example of a
historical or diachronical rhythmical tendency. Nowadays there is a
genuine rhythmical stress in word of four or more syllables (e.g. in
the word “celebration”);
3) retentive tendency consists in the retention of the primary accent in
word derivations. E.g. norm – normal; person – personal;
4) the semantic factor plays an important role in the accentuation of
certain categories of words. For example in prefixed words in which
the prefix lost its meaning (become, before, behind, forever) the
stress falls on the root of the word, but there are words with prefixes
which have their own meaning. In such words the semantic factor
cancels the rhythmical tendency. The same is true with compound
words in which both elements are considered to be of equal
semantic importance.