Pronunciation Integration #3: Word Stress & Word Formation

(Summary)
Marina Cantarutti
When we teach affixation (one of the many features of vocabulary), we can introduce, we should introduce, some features of word
stress. In particular, we may plunge into the stress-fixing, -neutral or -attracting features of English suffixes. Let's discuss one
of the ways in which we can define levels of stress/unstress in words. Cruttenden (2014) and Ortiz Lira's "Word Stress and
Sentence Accent" (1998) define four levels of prominence that we can represent through interlinear "tadpole" notation:

Levels of prominence. Based on Ortiz Lira (1998) and Cruttenden (2014)

Tadpole interlinear notation.

Stressed syllables are generally characterised by a change in pitch, and by generally being louder, and longer. These syllables
obviously have a full and strong vowel.
(Ortiz Lira (1998) has done a great job of explaining the differences between three tricky terms: stress, accent, and prominence. It is
interesting to note that both him and Cruttenden include in their description a level of unstressed syllables treated as "minor
prominences" only because of their full vowel quality, but not fully "prominent" in other ways... though perhaps quantity may also be of
interest here...)
This "word stress mess" that English is subject to is, in part, a result of the several linguistic "invasions" that have shaped the English
language through history. There are two main tendencies operating in English word stress, one towards early stress (Germanic,
Anglo-Saxon) and one towards late stress (Romanic, Latin) . These two forces are always in tension, and etymology does not
always help. As a result of this, in English we have secondary, and even, tertiary stresses early in the word when the main or primary
stress falls on the last two or three syllables of the word:

As you can see, there is also another important tendency in English to avoid "stress clash" and keep an alternation of stressed and
unstressed syllables whenever possible. At times, as in "pronunciation" and "information", this alternation is pretty mathematical:
1234, 1234, but this is not always the case; (See Ortiz Lira 1998 for a comprehensive list of stress patterns in polysyllabic words).
We can, to a certain extent, predict word stress in derivations (note that inflected forms are not subject to changes in stress). We can
divide suffixes into three groups:

So if we know the stress pattern in the root, we can have an idea as to where the primary and secondary stresses may fall once a
certain suffix has been appended to the root by knowing the behaviour of the suffix and also considering the tendency for alternation.
(For an extensive discussion of affixation and stress, check Cruttenden, 2014 and Teschner and Whitley, 2004, and one of the
appendices in Ashton and Shepherd, 2012). ///
The stress pattern of a polysyllabic word is a very important identifying feature of the word… We store words under stress patterns…
And we find it difficult to interpret an utterance in which a word is pronounced with the wrong stress pattern – we begin to “look up”
possible words under this wrong stress pattern. (Brown 1990:51 as cited in Gilbert 2008)