Linguistically relevant degrees of word stress

D.Jones, R.Kingdon, V.Vassilyev consider that there are three degrees of word stress in English:

Most English phoneticians put the stress mark before the stressed syllable and don’t mark monosyllabic words.

American linguists (B.Bloch, G.Trager, A.Hill) distinguish four degrees of word stress: 1) loud //, 2) reduced loud / /, 3) medial / / and 4) weak, which is not indicated.

H.A.Gleason defines such types of stress:

Secondary stress occurs before the primary. Tertiary stress usually occurs after the primary stress. Tertiary stress is linguistically important since it serves to differentiate some regional variants of English pronunciation, namely British and American.

H. Sweet distinguishes the following types of word stress: 1) extrastrong, or emphatic /;/, 2) strong 3) medium or half-strong /:/ and 4) weak / /.

Stress patterns of English words.

English word stress is free, it means that it may locate on any syllable in the word. That is why free accentual variants should not be confused with orthoepically incorrect accentuation.

In languages with fixed stress the localization of stress is always the same. For example, in Slovak and Czech the stress is on the first syllable; in Polish and Welsh it is on the penultimate syllable; in French the stress falls on the last syllable in the word.

In spite of the fact that English word stress is free there are some most common stress patterns. G.Torsuyev distinguishes .

The most frequent are:

^| – (words with one primary stress);

^| – ^| – (words with two primary stresses);

_| – ^| – (primary and secondary)

^| – ^| – ^| – (USA)

^| – ^| – ^| – ^| – (USSR)

^| – ^| – _| – (^|un^|sea_|worthy) and so on.

Linguists agreed that there exist the following main accentuation tendencies in English: recessive, retentive, rhythmic and semantic.

1. The Recessive Tendency: Recessive stress in Modern English is of two types:

a) unrestricted recessive accent

It is this accent which is observed in the words of Anglo-Saxon origin and in the great majority of native English words of this type (wonder, husband, etc.): 74% of disyllabic words have the stress pattern ^| – –, – ^|– (26%); three-syllable words: ^| – – – (55%), – ^| – – (39%), – – ^| – (6%); four syllable words: ^| – – – (36%), ^| – – – – (33%), – – ^| – – (29%), – – – ^| – (2%).

b) restricted recessive stress

(among, before, between, withstand, forget, forgive, etc.).

2. The Retentive Tendency

e.g. ^|wonder, ^|wonderful, ^|wonderfully; ^|person, ^|personal, ^|personally.

3. The Rhythmic Tendency:

^|exquisite or ex^|quisite, ^|sonorous or so^|norous, ^|hospitable or ho^|spitable.

4. The Semantic Tendency –