pronunciation

Question

pronunciation of accent?

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

Noun: [ 'æksent]
Verb: [æk'sent]

Rover_KE · Answer

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Rover

CalifJim · Answer

Anonymous pronunciation of accent?

['æks?nt]

CJ

Raindoctor · Answer

Two syllable words esp ending with -ace, -ent, -ment, -vent, etc are source of confusions for L2 speakers. Dictionaries list variations without telling what is going on.

If a verb is derived from an old noun, the stress does not change.
If a noun is derived from an old verb, the stress shifts to the first.
If a full vowel is retained in the second syllable and the first syllable is stressed, you can call the second syllable mid-stressed.
A.A Hill (1931) and Charles-James Bailey (1995) noted the above.

If a word is not frequently used, it can be fit in either way: here, analogy works.

['æk ?s?nt] AmE verb and noun

['æk s?nt] BrE noun (from MW)

[æk 's?nt ] (verb) A variant pronunciation.

MW lists [fr? 'kw?nt] as a first choice for the word 'frequent'. However, I see ['fri kw?nt] (a second choice in MW) is heavily used!

CalifJim · Answer

raindoctorIf a verb is derived from an old noun, the stress does not change.If a noun is derived from an old verb, the stress shifts to the first.

Good information.

I don't know how to tell which way the derivations go, though, except by "reverse engineering". For example, I know the stress for the noun and verb for "convict", by which I can deduce that this is the second case you mention -- a noun derived from an old verb. But what if I'm a foreign student of English. Where do I find out that 'convict' is an "old verb" from which the noun was derived? What should we tell our students when this question comes up? Any ideas?

CJ

Raindoctor · Answer

There are two issues: How one comes up with a hypothesis (call it a rule, as how it is sold to the ESL public) to account for some phenomena? How to evaluate that hypothesis? These two processes are independent.

Let's start with someone who doesn't know any thing about old verb, old noun, new verb, new noun, etc. He has collected 167 two syllable words. And each word has two forms: adjective/noun; verb.

Next he looks up the dictionary, writes down all stress, syllable, vowel details for these 167 words. If he can memorize all these details, there is no problem. Good for him. Or build some android/iphone app and another brain chip to implant, and integrate these somehow; he gets the result what he wants. He knows the 'correct' pronunciation on demand. Job is done!

Not all L2 speakers are that bright. So, they find some patterns in these 167 words. These patterns are not explanations; after all, they are observations at a different level of abstraction. To the Wall street MBA schmucks, finding patterns is same as explanations! Now, our hypothetical L2 speaker thinks that he is onto something; he discusses with his friends. And one of his friends advises him to look at "Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages" by Marianne Celce-Murcia, et al. He borrows this book and finds that words with latinate prefixes like pro- and re- receive stress on the first syllable when used as nouns, and on the second syllable when used as verbs. Later, he finds another set of words violate this pattern. Here, he can remember these exceptions or find another hypothesis (rule) for the exceptions he has. After that, he finds both diachronic and synchronic variation in stress patterns of some words. He also sees one stress pattern is preferred to another. Here, he should realize that English does not have one system (one rule), but has multiple subsystems. Sometimes, these subsystems are in conflict, leading to variation, etc.

Of course, papers like these ( http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~morgan/phonBookDraft0110.pdf ) miss the existing research on variation. Instead, they sell statistics, along with an adhoc explanation of analogy. There's another problem with L2 speakers who do research on these issues. These guys don't study the history of English; they just collect statistics, and create a state diagram like the co-author of that paper did. Explain it away with analogy, frequency, etc.

The pronunciation of 2 syllable names of places and names provide more gist about how native speakers operate when they see random names, etc. This synchronic data is better than a dictionary. Forvo is another great place to get variable pronunciation of city names like Concord, CA vs Concord, MI/MA.

Well, English is not an inflected language. That's why it appears easy for L2 speakers, easy in the sense of spelling, grammar, reading texts, etc. In non-inflected languages, pronunciation phenomena is tougher than those in inflected languages. However, to learn inflected languages, you need to spend much more time memorizing all various combinations of inflections, and thats the initial difficulty, after that everything goes smoother. In non-inflected languages, initial investment is minimal (since there are no complex inflections), and face hurdles later.

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