Stress

Hi again! Gee, I sure haven’t been updating at all lately, have I? Something I’ll have to fix once my life gets in some semblance of order. Say, next spring?

But that’s not important right now. What’s important is learning! And for today’s Thirsty for Knowledge Thursday, I’ve decided to talk a little bit about English stress patterns and how they affect both the sound and meaning of a word. First off, we need to define “stress.” And I’m not talking about the kind that makes your blood pressure go up or the kind that causes bridges to collapse though all of these types of stress do have some things in common. Nope, here stress is intensifying a speech sound, syllable or general loudness of a word. You can also think of it in terms of emphasis if that helps.

Since we’re mostly concerned with syllables today, we’ll say that stress is emphasizing (making louder and also a bit longer) a syllable in a word. If you say one single-syllable word, it is stressed. If you say one two-syllable word, either the first or the last syllable is stressed (depending on many variables, some of which we’ll get into later). It goes on and on with every word in the English language bearing a particular stress pattern. It can be on the ultimate syllable (i.e. last), the penultimate (i.e. second to last) or antepenultimate (i.e. third to last), or for words with lots and lots of syllables, there may be more than one stressed syllable. A word like antidisestablishmentarianism has several! (Try and count them!)

Anyone who has ever studied poetry can testify that stress is very important to English poems and plays. And why is that? Because stress is very important to the English language and helps to make it what it is. After all, not all languages have stress like we do. French, for example, doesn’t have stress for individual words. Instead, they have rhythmic groups where phrases have just a little bit of stress on the very last syllable of the sentence. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but this works for now.) Another thing that makes the English stress patterns unique is that they change. Actually, they change a lot. Here are some examples of words with the same base but where the stress pattern changes depending on how many syllables there are: (The stressed syllable is in bold.)

1. photo
2. photograph
3. photography
4. photographer

In the first, the stress is on the penult, in the second through fourth on the antepenult. Notice also that the shift in stress caused a shift in vowel sounds between the first two (“pho”) and the last two (“to”). In English, the two are heavily related. (As a side note, it’s interesting to remark that the time it takes you to say the first word is the almost the exact same amount of time to say the last word. In English, syllables are shortened more and more in order to keep up a steady 1-2 beat throughout entire sentences giving it the stereotypical “horse hoof beat” that characterisizes it.) If you change the position of stress in a word, you must also change its pronunciation, and if you change its pronunciation, you also change the stress. I have a friend who likes to change the stress on “apologize” from “apologize” to “apologize,” making the first syllable of the word sound more like “apple” than “apall.”

So, English not only has a system of stresses and stress patterns, but it uses it to its advantage to make distinctions between words and create new ones. The most common example of this is in verb/noun pairs. By changing the stress in a word (and thereby changing its pronunciation), you get a new word which can have a related meaning. “To record” is a verb and “a record” is its related noun. “To present” is a verb and “a present” is its related noun. There are lots of these in English (e.g. “object, subject, project” etc.), most of them being two syllables because that’s the easiest pattern to flip-flop. There are even noun/adjective pairs which work like this such as “He is an adept” versus “He is adept.” In other languages, such distinctions may be made with word endings or vowel changes (but not stress changes as well) or the addition of other markers such as gender. Yup, English sure has a lot of linguistic intricacies to mix things up. But then again, all languages do.

One thing that I’ve always found fascinating concerning English stress/pronunciation is that while generally it’s the grammatical function, number of syllables or what have you that changes stress or pronunciation, there are some oddball coincidences that are just neat to know. For example, I know of one word in English that changes pronunciation just by capitalizing it (though the stress pattern remains the same–an oddity), and I know of a word that changes not only stress pattern/pronunciation, but also gender/number just by adding one letter. Do you know what these are? I’ll give you until tomorrow to think about it. (Or look them up on-line, lol.)