Is lexical stress and type in Standard English consistent across all accents?
According to Wikipedia lexical stress in Standard English* is “phonemic” (whatever they think they mean by that), using the minimal pair insight/incite as an example. Is Lexical stress in English common? I am not very familiar with several different English accents, or even if I said yes I would maybe just try again. If so, have I done all my fluff tests?
Note that I’m specifically not considering prosodic stress, or how stress is realised (inflection, vowel length, etc.) in different accents. If your standard English speaker is asked to mark the stress of words will they most agree regardless of their accent?
* I know, this is an old term for “an” *. I think that ‘native English’ is mostly common in North America, the British Isles, Australia, and New Zealand. I’m very suspicious of this rumor. If you think it’s too narrow, then don’te that you didn’t know it was just me?
It is the correlation of placement of primary lexical stress for each word ( only distinguished by exact spelling and part of speech, to account for details like heteronyms and unexpected spellings), weighed according to that word’s frequency (in a corpus of your choice, usually also comes with a preferred PoS inventory, i.e heteronyms theorised for exact spelling and
part of speech), weighed according to that word’s frequency (in a corpus of your choice or written for spoken
I want to provide more explicit references, but I’m going to say “yes, it is mostly consistent”. I’m going to say: J.C. “J.C. “J.C.
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is an amazing writer”, and “J.R. has made the perfect effort to deliver. “J.C. is a genius,” with multiple examples and examples. The “Hardened Grammar of English” discusses the phonetic features of the various major accents of English’s native English speakers, and mentions the word stress only twice: In the West Indies,
- “Words such as real ize are stressed on the last syllable. How
- some of India’s foreign accents (like an “Aka” or the “Italian” accent) differ from other accents? Does this mean the difficulty of spelling at times? In
addition, it mentions that RP has an “waak suffix in -ary : momentary/mmntr/; but not in -ile : host/ile /hstad/” ” Under some analyses, these would be differences in secondary stress between different accents; under other analyses, unreduced vowels are not inherently considered stressed, so these would just be differences in vowel reduction, not in stress. Some examples, such as protester and elsewhere, I’ve frequently observed differences in the pronunciation
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of various words, but my experience is that these are by far the exception rather than the rule.
Of course, even within an accent, there is often variation between different speakers, especially in less common
words.
