4.8. Comparing English and Russian

There are more common features than differences in the nature and functions of English and Russian word stress.

The main functions of Russian word stress are the same as they are in English: constitutive and word-identifying. The differentiating and delimitative functions of word stress are secondary for Russian, although the free placement of stress does result in the existence of accentual minimal pairs: 'мука — му'ка, however, the chances of their appearing in the same con­text are small. The delimitative function of word stress is not as great as it is in the languages with a fixed stress but it shows through the accentual unity of a Russian word: the great majority of Russian words contain only one stressed syllable, and this culminative effect facilitates the recognition of word boundaries in the flow of speech. Even in compound words secondary stress is optional: водопровод, сельскохозяйственный, /сельскохозяйственный (Svetozarova 1998).

Although English and Russian belong to the group of free lexical stress it does not mean that there are no generalizations about word stress placement which constitute inner knowledge of a native speaker of either language or that stress placement is arbitrary. Russian people are very sensitive to misplacement of stress which could be a social marker of foreign or regional accent.

In English the main factors governing stress placement are morphological, with nouns opposed to verbs and adjectives, and rhythmical, based on syllable weight and the regularity of strong and weak syllables alternating. As we have seen, in the vast majority of English nouns primary stress falls on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable (the so-called recessive tendency) depending on the weight of the syllable: if the penultimate syllable is heavy, it is stressed; otherwise it is the antepenultimate syllable that is stressed. (There are also nouns which have stress on the final syllable because it is heavy: ca'nal, de'gree.) Verbs and adjectives are quite different from nouns in that there are many of them with the stress on the final syllable.

In English compound nouns tend to have primary stress on the first word, while verbs, adjectives and adverbs — on the last word. The rule is: if the first part of the compound is adjectival in its meaning, stress goes on the second element, as in secondhand, whereas if the first element is a noun, stress goes on that element, as in 'sunrise {Carr 2001). There are more models of stress than these two: as many as five most common models were found, including those with a secondary stress either on the first or the second element. An important finding is that no two primary stresses may occur in a compound word: sixteen, good-'looking. The model with two primary stresses has been replaced by a more productive model secondary +primary in the 60s —70s of the 20^th century.

It is the presence of secondary stresses in long words that makes English stress placement especially difficult for Russian learners. The tendencies which determine secondary stress placement are rhythmical (regularity in strong and weak syllables alternation) and retentive (secondary stress retains the position of primary stress): 'demonstrate — demons'tration. The retentive tendency in English preserves stress in derivatives on the root: 'hand — 'handy — 'handful.

In Russian, word stress is free in the sense that it can fall on any syllable in the word and any morpheme (root, prefix or suffix): 'дорого, до'роже, доро'гой, дорого'вато, 'ходит, хо'дить, 'выходить, выхо'дить, выхо'жу. But despite the apparently random nature of stress placement in modern Russian, there exist certain well-defined paradigmatic regularities based on word class. Thus the principle of Russian stress location is also morpho­logical. According to A. Zaliznyak, in modern Russian there are six major accentual classes of nouns: 1) with a constant stress on the stem — 'карта, 2) with a constant stress on the affix — оч'ко, and four classes with variable stress — 'море — мо'рей. Given the morphological class of the stem, we can find the exact stress location of any form of the word. There are other rules and exceptions in Russian, and very often we have to look up the word in the dictionary to make sure if the stress is right. However, there was a time in the history of the Russian language when the accentual paradigm was much simpler: there were only three classes of stems which determined the position of stress. The dramatic event that affected the Russian pho­nological system was the unstressed vowels reduction (Кодзасов, Кривнова 2001).

. One more point in Russian and English makes the physical nature of stress in the two languages to a certain extent different. Traditionally both English and Russian are referred to as languages with a dynamic stress. However, now that we know that there are at least four aspects of prominence which create the sensation of stress in English and Russian (pitch, loudness, length, vowel quality), we have to consider the order of ranking them for each language separately.

Russian is reported to have length (vowel duration) and vowel quality as the two basic features. Compare the length of vowels: сама (102 мс — 146 мс), пили (120 мс — 232 мс), покатил (55 мс — 104 мс — 203 мс), патока (195 мс — 55 мс — 90 мс) {Златоустова и др. 1997).

In English the following hierarchy of relevant prosodic features has been experimentally established (in order of importance) first by D.B. Fry and then by Use Lehiste: pitch > length > loudness. Vowel quality is an important parameter too (Lehiste 1970).

Thus we can conclude that pitch and length are particularly important cues for stress perception in English, whereas vowel length and vowel quality are decisive for the Russian language. It does not mean, however, that stressed vowels are much longer in Russian than in English. Recent research has given evidence that Russian women whose speech was recorded in mass media interviews, for instance, tend to prolong not only the stressed syllable but also the one preceding it as well (and, occasionally, the one that follows). As a result, the contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in Russian gives the ratio of 1.3:1, while in British English (RP) it is much higher: 1.7:1, and in American women's speech it is a little lower than in RP: 1.5:1. Besides this higher contrast in length British (RP) speakers make greater contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in pitch. The effect of stronger stress in English is supported by experimental data in a number of cross-cultural studies. However, stress contrasts in the actual running speech is already the domain of intonation and sentence stress. The paradigm of word stress is superseded by the syntagmatic relations of words in the running text (see Part V. Intonation and Prosody).

Summary

Stress is the degree offer of force used in producing a syllable. Stressed syllables are more prominent than unstressed ones. The prominence is usually due to an increase in loudness of the stressed syllable but increase in length and often pitch may contribute to the overall impression of prominence. Wbrd stress is a stress pattern of a word. Accent is a means of making a word or a syllable stand out in a stream of speech, associated mainly with pitch change, and is therefore synonymous to sentence stress. The phonetic means of sentence stress are the same as of word stress: loudness, pitch and duration, especially pitch. Thus the term stress is more often used to refer to all sorts of prominence, while accent is more often associated with pitch. The domain of word stress is a word, the domain of accent is the whole utterance.

The acoustic correlates of the prosodic features of length, loudness and pitch are duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. On the articulatory level greater loudness is achieved by subglottal muscular adjustment which will create an acoustic effect of increased amplitude. Laryngeal muscular adjustment will create increased tension in the vocal folds which will result in increased fundamental frequency, i.e. pitch. However, the auditory sensation of loudness will increase here as well. Thus there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a certain articulatory gesture and an auditory effect. Experimental data show that pitch and length are particularly important cues for stress perception in English, whereas vowel length and vowel quality are decisive for the Russian language. The overall impression of greater stress in English is due to a greater contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in pitch and duration.

It is the presence of secondary stress that distinguishes the rhythm of an English polysyllabic word from a Russian word of the same length. In Russian there is only one word stress in a word, it is called culminative as the whole word is centered around it. The main functions of Russian word stress are the same as they are in English: constitutive and word-identifying. The differentiating and delimitative functions of word stress are secondary for Russian, although the free placement of stress does result in the exist­ence of accentual minimal pairs: 'мука - му'ка. In languages with a fixed stress the delimitative (demarcative) function comes first: word stress sig­nals either the beginning or the end of words. In English and in Russian word stress is free and variable.

In order to decide on stress placement in English it is necessary to make use of the following factors:

• whether the word is morphologically simple, complex or compound;

• the grammatical category to which the word belongs (noun, verb, adjective etc.);

• the number of syllables in the word;

• the phonological structure of syllables (syllable weight).

Thus the main factors are morphological and rhythmical. Stress models with a secondary stress are especially productive. The recent finding of the second half of the 20^th century is that no two primary stresses may occur in a word.