Re: "Double stressed" words

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 05:47:38AM -0400, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> > I can't distinguish the stress in words like 'philosophically'. If I was
> > going to mark the stress in it, I would've guessed it as /"fIl@%sOfIkli/
> > for no reason other than stress ought to go on the first stressable
> > syllable :P . So I would say that certainly my ideolect doesn't
> > distinguish between them. I don't know how generalisable this is to my
> > dialect as a whole, though.
>
> Interesting.  To me, /'fIl@,sOf@kli/ sounds just as odd as, say, emphasizing
> the first syllable in "Australia".  What about "Administration"?
> To me that's /&d,mIn@'strejSn=/.
The same: I'm almost certain the stress is identical on both stressable
syllables. In that word, I'd recognise the -ation enditing and I know that
they standardly get the primary stress (learning by osmosis from this list
and other places), so I'd be able to write it 'correctly' if I thought
about it. However, I say /@dmIn@stSr&iS@n/ with a schwa in the first
syllable.

> In both words, the location of the primary stress is very clear, but
> I have to stop and think and repeat the word to myself in order to locate
> the secondary stress.
Really? If I repeat the word I get lost and now I don't know if I do have
a single primary stress in a word like 'administration' or not. But my
first instinct is that the second and fourth syllables have the same
stress, so that's what I'm going with. And the fact that neither
[@d"mIn@%stSr&iS@n] nor [@d%mIn@"stSr&iS@n] sounds more wrong than the
other helps me want to keep this conclusion.

I think essentially the way it works for words of 3+ syllables is that I
divide vowels up into stressable and unstressable, and stressable ones get
stressed and unstressable ones don't. The division would be:

Unstressable: all /@/. As I came to think of it, I would say it has an
allophone of [I] before /k/, /g/, /N/, /tS/, /dZ/, /S/ (hence
'philosophically' would actually be /fIl@sOf@kli/ with the second /@/
realised as [I]. All /i/, /u\/ (as opposed to /Ii/ ee, /i\u\/ oo, but I
think they're in complimentary distribution). Some word final diphthongs.
('Tomato', for instance, clearly has it's (primary) stress on the second
syllable.)

Stressable: all the rest.

Words of two syllables I'm not exactly sure about. I think generally words
with two syllables which can take stress on either syllable are either
compounds or borrowings (except that word 'compound' sticks out there
being annoying, but it still obeys the rule I'm about to propose). I think
*generally* they get their stress on the first syllable and the second one
is unstressed but with quality, or has secondry stress or something (e.g.
garage: /"g&ra:dZ/, cafe: /"k&f&i/).  But there are people who would say
them differently (e.g. [k_h&"f&i]). I find that one hard: I want to make
it more like [k_h@"f&i].

So maybe it's simply: stress isn't phonemic for me and falls on all
stressable syllables in words of three or more syllables; the first one
otherwise. That's not perfect, but it's getting close.

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still
be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.
                -- Snoopy