Accentual Types of Words

All the words of the English language can be divided into a number of what is usually described as “accentual types”, i.e. certain stress patterns to which different words belong.

The enormous problem and trouble with the English words is, that first of all, in contrast with Russian, the situation when we have one strong unifying stress, for example in “territory” or “literature” is, perhaps, the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, long vowels and diphthongs in English are always as-73

sociated with a certain degree of stress,⁵³ however weakly stressed they may be, despite the fact that a long vowel or diphthong in a relatively weakly stressed syllable does not have the same length that it would have in a stressed syllable. For example:

1 3 1 3 1 3 3 1 3 1 4

Phoneme foreword compound idea sarcastic

The proper distribution of the types of stress within a word is something that forms the indispensable part of the acquisition of the English vocabulary, its correct use in speech and understand­ing of oral speech.

If we turn to the enormous literature on accentual types, we shall see that the thing more or less boils down to the abstract system, to the gnoseological level, with which everything begins and everything ends. Thus, for instance:⁵⁴

Pattern Examples

2 syllables 3.1. — unknown, Chinese, idea, antique, thirteen,

canteen, cashier, chastise 4.1. — alone, machine, arrive, behind, invent, reform

1.3. — profile, placard, female, invoice, programme,

window

1.4. — over, under, husband, valley, rhythm, cotton,

table

3 syllables 2.4.1. — understand, cigarette, magazine, entertain,

personnel, seventeen, afternoon 1.4.4. — quantity, yesterday, innocence, bachelor, wan-

derer 1.4.3. — appetite, pedigree, photograph, cataract, tel-

ephone 4.1.3. — important, encounter, excessive, relation, eleven

And so on and so forth, with 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 syllables. How­ever, it would be methodologically wrong to confine our investi­gation to the mere “emic” description of accentual types (which in most cases is a very competent and most reliable description of what actually is happening in speech).

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Emically, the listing of accentual types is easily attained and has already been achieved by quite a number of scholars. When we turn to speech, at least three special points must be made.

First and foremost, the accentual type of a word is not fixed once and for all, it is liable to change. Thus, for instance, in some words containing more than two syllables there is a tendency to avoid a succession of weak syllables, especially if these contain No. 12 or No. 2. For example:

’exquisite — ex’quisite ’deficit — de’ficit ’integral — in’tegral ’mischievous — mis’chievous ’inculpate — in’culpate ’acumen — a’cumen ’precedence — precedence im’portune — impor’tune ’premature — |prema’ture ’sonorous — so’norous

Similarly, in words of four syllables, there is variation between the patterns with the strong primary stress on the first syllable and the patterns where it is shifted to the second syllable:

’controversy — con’troversy ’hospitable — hos’pitable ’despicable — de’spicable ’formidable — for’midable ’capitalist — ca’pitalist ’aristocrat — a’risto,crat

A relatively new word such as “television” now appears to have the pattern 1.4.4.4. predominantly, the variant 2.4.1.4. being less common.

Longer words, too, often exhibit the tendency towards the al­ternation of stressed and unstressed syllables with various rhyth­mic patterns. For example:

articu’latory, [a:| tikju’eitdari], [a: ’tikjulatri]

in’explicable — inex’plicable

|

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It should also be noted, and not in passing that a word’s ac­centual pattern is influenced by the accentual structure of a simi­lar word of frequent occurrence. Thus,

ap’ply — ap’plicable pre’fer — pre’ferable

The word “comparable” is one more example of this kind. For quite a long time the only correct pronunciation of this word was “’comparable”. Now even some of the best speakers say “com’parable”.

The so-called even-stressed words present special difficulty in so far as the accentual types of English words are concerned. They usually consist of two lexical morphemes. It is particularly difficult for a Russian learner of English to master the accen­tual pattern of words of this kind. This happens because of the shifting of their accentual pattern in speech. If we consult a dictionary, it indicates two equally strong primary stresses (e.g. ’broad-’shouldered), but the actual realization, pronunciation of these words depends on their syntactic position, for example:

This girl is_|good-_\looking, but a ’good-looking_\girl

’Afternoon tea, but ’Good_|afternoon!

We shall certainly meet in the_|aftemoon.

He is very_|good natured, but He is a ’good_|-natured_\man.

However, “it is not even-stressed words that cause all the trou­ble, because there is also a subtle interplay of all these accentual types in actual speech, and we should be always fully aware of it. To illustrate this point let us turn to the two extracts from S.Maugham’s novel “Theatre”:

The 1st extract:

He was then a man of nearly forty, with a small head on an elegant body, not very _|good_|-looking but of distinguished appearance. He looked very _|well-_|bread, which indeed he was, and he had exquisite manners. He was an amateur of the arts. He bought modern pictures and collected old furniture. He was a lover of music and exceedingly well read.

In this extract we may observe the shifting of the accentual pattern in “good-looking” and “well-bread”, which is in keeping with their syntactic position.

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The 2nd extract:

Roger was_|seven_\teen. He was a ’nice-_|looking_\boy, with reddish hair and blue eyes, but that was the best you could say of him. He had neither his mother’s vivacity and changing expression nor his father’s beauty of feature. Julia was somewhat disap­pointed in him. As a child when she had been constantly pho­tographed with him he was lovely. He was rather stolid now and he had a serious look. Really when you came to examine him his only good features were his teeth and his hair.

Here the even-stressed words are “seventeen” and “nice-look­ing”, which also behave according to the rules.

APPENDIX 8

The Main Approaches to Phonological Theory

For a very large number of years there have been people who thought that the anthropophonic aspect of the sounds of a particular language, their specific features, the national peculiarities of pronun­ciation are of little scientific interest, and attention was mostly con­centrated on what was usually described as phonological theories.

This subject is given very much attention and time in the uni­versity course of “Introduction to General Linguistics” in the 1st year, where a very competent discussion of some of phonological theories which are most significant is given. As far as we are con­cerned, however, we shall confine ourselves just to those aspects of that enormous problem which are particularly important for English, which the anglicist should know about.

It is very important to say here that although we had the so-called ’natural phonologists’ quite a long time ago, still we speak of phonology as a science only in the latest period — at the end of the XIXth — the beginning of the XXth century. And it is quite natural that with the rapid development of phonology as a science, as a scientific discipline, quite a number of different trends appeared. And usually the different trends in Phonology are divisible into two main classes: the ’inner approaches’ and the

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’outer approaches’. We leave out all those methods that are based on ’outer’ approaches, because they are based on mathematical, logical constructions and formulae. They may be just enumerated: there is the algebraic approach and the Code-Restricting one, ’The Fictionalist’ approach and the ’Mentalist ’ one.

We, however, are concentrating on what is usually described as ’inner approaches’. The phonological trends belonging to this class are described in great detail in O.S. Akhmanova’s book “Phonology, Morphonology, Morphology” and the book by R. Jakobson and Moris Halle “Fundamentals of Lan­guage”.⁵⁵

Among the ’inner’ approaches we have singled out the four main ones: the minimal pairs approach, the approach of the so-called Leningrad school, the approach of the so-called classical Moscow school and the right, the correct approach to phonol­ogy that was elaborated at our faculty by Смирнитский A.И. и Aванесов P.И. (which is dealt with in great detail in Part I, Chapter 2 of the present manual).

We shall begin with the Leningrad phonological school be­cause it is most consistently phonological in the sense that it is based entirely on sounds.

As the different approaches are everywhere associated with names, it would not be totally out of place to mention the names of some of the representatives of this school: Л.B. Щepбa “Фонетика французского языка” (1937); H.H. Maтyceвич, B.B. Зиндep, A.H. Гвоздев.

According to the Leningrad phonological school both in “мышь” and “poжь” we have the phoneme [Г]. It means that the fundamental (or strong-position) variant of this phoneme is [Г]. No gradations are taken into account as in “poжь-pжи”. It is obvious that the Leningrad school tries to liberate its conclu­sions entirely either from morphonological or lexical considera­tions. And this is their main idea.

The representatives of the Moscow phonological school, on the contrary, would say that in «мышь» we have the phoneme [Г] and in “poжь” we have the phoneme [ж] because in a strong positi on «ш» in cases of this kind is pronounced [ж] (in «pжи», for example).

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The Moscow phonological school holds that phonology stud­ies the relationship between the actual sounds and the way they function in words and morphemes. We, however, think that this is morphonology.

By way of illustrating the views of the Moscow phonological school on the aims and subject of phonology, we would like to adduce the definition of phonology as printed in O.C. Широков’s book «Bведениe в общее языкознание» which was published in 1985.

Phonology, according to O.C. Шиpoкoв, is a linguistic sci­ence which concerns itself with the functioning of the so-called ’cenemes’ (according to Hjelmslev). Cenemes are those minimal phonetic units which do not convey any meaning, have no mean­ing of their own. And phonology compares them with morphemes and words — that is to say, with the units of the semantic level. So, according to O.C. Шиpoкoв, phonology does not exist as an independent discipline. He begins directly with the morphonologi-cal approach.