Chapter 8: Suprasegmental Phonology: Stress, Rhythm, Intonation

8.1. Stess and prominence. The phonemic (contrastive) function of stress

8.2. Free stress and fixed stress. The predictability of accentual patterns
8.3. Metric patterns
8.4. Morphological processes and stress shift
8.5. Primary and secondary stress
8.6. Weak and strong forms. Vowel reduction and delition
8.7. Rhythm
8.8. Intonational contours. Their pragmatic value

8.2. Free stress and fixed stress. The predictability of accentual

patterns

Before we get a closer look at this contrastive value of stress in English we should
say a few general things about stress in this language. Unfortunately for foreign students
of the language, English, like Romanian, is a language where stress placement is
completely unpredictable. We can therefore say that in such languages we have a free
stress system. In languages like Hungarian, or Czech, for instance, stress always falls on
the first syllable of the word. In French and Turkish, it is the last syllable that is always
stressed, while in Polish the last but one. Such languages are systems that have
positionally fixed stress. In Spanish, there are strict rules for stress placement either on
the last or on the penultimate (last but one) syllable and all the exceptions are marked
graphically.
It should also be pointed out that stress is a relational and gradual feature, since
we described it in terms of prominence of certain elements in comparison to others.
Therefore, there are no absolute degrees – maximal stress and no stress at all – and we
can only say that some structures display this feature to a greater extent than other. This
is even more obvious in English where, as we are going to see, we will have to define
several degrees of stress.