TYPES OF ENGLISH WORD STRESS

2.1. Types of English word stress according to its degree.One of the ways of differentiating the prominence of syllables is manipulating the degree of stress. A polysyllabic word has as many degrees of stress as there are syllables in it. Designating the strongest syllable by 1, the second strongest by 2, etc., we may represent the distribution of stresses in the following examples:

examination indivisibility

IgzæmIneI∫(ə)n IndIvIzIbIlətI

3 2 4 1 5 2 5 3 6 1 7 4

But from a linguistic point, i.e. for the purposes of differentiating words from other and identifying them, the fourth, the fifth and other degrees of lexical stress are redundant in English, while the distinctive and recognitive relevance of the third degree of stress is a subjective point. The majority of British phoneticians (D. Jones, R. Kingdon, A. C. Gimson among them) and Russian phoneticians (V. A. Vassilyev, J. Shakhbagova ) consider that there are three degrees of word-stress in Eng1ish:

·primary –thestrongest

· secondary– the second strongest, partial, and

· weak– all the other degrees.

The syllables bearing either primary or secondary stress are termedstressed, while syllables with wear stress are called, somewhat inaccurately, unstressed.

The stress in a word may be on the last syllable, the ult; on the next-to-last (the second from the end), the penult; on the third syllable from the end, the antepenult;and a few words are stressed on the fourth syllable from the end, the pre-antepenult.

2.2. Types of English word stress according to its position.Languages of the world which make a linguistic use of stress fail into one of the two broad types:

1) locating the word-stress predominantly on a given syllabic location in the word or

2) allowing much more freedom for placement the stress.

We can call the first type a language which uses (predominantly) fixed lexical stress,and the second type one which permits variable lexical(free) stress.

The languages with fixed lexical stress are exemplified in the following table:

A relatively small proportion of the languages of the world allow a range of different locations of lexical stress, i.e.variable/(free) lexical stress: Dutch, English, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Swedish, etc.

In languages with variable/(free) lexical stress, e.g. English. Ukrainian, etc., it may fall on the first syllable in some words, in others – on the second or third (etc.), i.e. it is free in the sense that the main stress is not tied to any particular location in the chain of syllables constituting a word as in languages with fixed lexical stress, e.g.:

However, the stress pattern of English words is fixed, in the sense that the main strеss always falls on a particular syllable of a given word (with certain exceptions of words unstable stress structures), e.g. the Ukrainian word cmyде́нm is always stressed on the second syllable.