The stress Patterns of English words

There are languages in which stress is always falls on the first syllable (as in Czech and Finish), or on the last syllable (as in French and Turkish). Word stress is in such languages is said to be fixed. English words is said to be free because stress is not fixed to any particular syllable, in all the words of the language.

G. Torsuyev, who has made a special analyses of English stress patterns, distinguishes more than 100 stress patterns, which he groups into 11 main types. The most common among them are:

 (Words w/I primary stress as in “'after”)

  (Words w/2 primary stresses, as in “'week'end”)

_&_  (words w/one primary and one secondary stress, as in 'hair-, dresser, maga'zine).

Though w-s in English is called free, there are certain tendencies in English which regulate the accentuation of words. There are 2 main accentuation tendencies: the recessive and the rhythmic tendency.

According to the recessive tendency, stress falls on the 1^st syllable (e.g. “'mother”, “'father”, “'sister”, “'brother”) or on the 2^nd syllable (e.g. be'come, in'deed, for'give etc.) According to the rhythmic tendency stress is on the 3^rd syllable from the end (in'tensity, possi'bility).

It has also been noticed that the stress of the parent word is often retained in the derivatives. 'Personal-,perso'nality, 'nation-,natio'nality.

This regularity is sometimes called the retentive tendency in English.

There is one more tendency in English: the tendency to stress the most important elements in words. Such negative prefixes as “-un, -in, -mis, -ex, -vice, -sub, -under, semantically important elements in compound words: well-'known, red-'hot, bad-'tempered.