In spite of the difficulty that stress assignment rules pose for speakers of English and researchers of the language alike, the topic of stress variation in dictionary entries versus connected speech has so far eluded the attention of English language scholars. This monograph aims at bridging the gap by presenting an all-encompassing study of stress doublets in English, i.e. those (mostly) lexical words that are variably stressed without changing their meaning, drawing a systematic comparison between the double stress patterns of words cited in dictionaries, and the way those words are most often stressed by native speakers in connected speech.
As Tokar's volume evinces, English has hundreds of stress doublets, from ˈabsolute/absoˈlute and ˈadult/aˈdult through to ˈvicinal/viˈcinal and ˈYugoslav/Yugosˈlav. The countless examples that populate the monograph vary immensely with regard to their etymology, phonological and morphological makeup, and frequency of use: all this requires a thorough analysis of the different possible scenarios in order to provide the reader with a satisfactory explanation for the existence of stress dyads in English, on the one hand, and for the preference for one of the two possible stress assignment patterns on the part of native speakers, on the other.
The book is divided into seven main chapters comprising an introduction, a chapter that deals with the theoretical framework of the study, a methodological chapter, two chapters that explore stress assignment in English and analyse a good number of case studies, respectively, and the concluding chapter. In addition, the volume presents the reader with a list of references, an appendix that includes all the stress doublets that appear in the book, and a final list of abbreviations.
The introductory chapter (pp. 3–24) states what the main focus of the book is (‘English words with stress doublets), the dialects that it deals with (‘in both British and American English’), and the questions that it intends to answer, namely ‘what are the causes of stress variation? … Why do only some English words have stress doublets? Do words with stress doublets prefer particular stress patterns and if so, why?’ and, more generally, ‘why English words … are stressed the way they are stressed’ (p. 3).
Although the book acknowledges the widely accepted diachronic view that the rules of English stress come from Latin and Old French, it crucially supports a synchronic view whereby the Latin rule presents too many counterexamples in English, which makes it necessary to account for other principles in order to explain the vast amount of stress doublets in contemporary English. In Tokar's opinion, ‘words with stress doublets challenge the popular assumption that stress in a polysyllabic English word should fall upon a particular syllable when it exhibits a particular segmental makeup … Additionally, cases of stress variation among suffixed derivatives raise the question of why in the case of some English suffixes, there is apparently more than one diacritic feature triggering a particular stress-related behavior’ (pp. 10–11).
The last section of the introductory chapter covers a relevant number of studies that have dealt, albeit sometimes tangentially, with the topic of English stress. Stemming from the description and evaluation of the main contents of those previous studies, the volume addresses two of the main issues that the topic of stress variation necessarily involves, namely the issue of stress variation and syllabic length, and the issue of stress variation and frequency of use. The author is quick to point out that neither the former nor the latter is directly connected to the phenomenon of stress variation (pp. 21–2). He also takes the opportunity to note that, while the existing studies are mostly based on either the intuitions of the researchers or the data found in dictionaries only, this volume presents data extracted from YouTube videos, which is indeed a novelty.
Chapter 2 (pp. 25–37) focuses on the discussion of the phonetic properties of stress. It starts by discussing the differences between stress and accent, where the latter is defined as ‘a phonetic realization of phrasal stress’ (p. 25), while the former has to do with the attachment of a longer duration (among other less important phonetic cues) to a specific syllable within a word in out-of-focus environments; in other words, stress is a pre-condition for accent, but not vice versa. The notion of phrasal stress is also discussed in relation to pitch accent in bi- and triconstituent compounds (e.g. budget deficit, Boston gang members), which reveals the importance of distinguishing the different phonetic realisations of word stress when the stressed syllable is (un)accented (pp. 26–8). To close the exploration of the correlation between stress, on the one hand, and frequency, intensity and duration, on the other, Tokar concludes that duration clearly is the most salient phonetic cue in order to perceive stress.
In connection to the distinction between stress and accent, the author is careful to unpack the differences between primary and secondary stress in polysyllabic words. He highlights the idea that left-prominent words occurring in accented position show only one pitch accent on the primary stressed syllable, while right-prominent words show two equal pitch accents (e.g. ˈillustrate vs ˈilluˈstration). The most important conclusion is that ‘primary stress is phonetically not different from secondary stress’ in English (p. 30). This view entails that the potential theoretical differences between the dictionary transcriptions of a word like meningococcic as meˈningoˈcoccic and meˌningoˈcoccic are not relevant; actually, the pronunciations of those two transcriptions are identical, which would mean that no stress doublet really exists for such words.
The chapter also includes a short discussion about the physical correlates of (un)stressed syllables, namely parameters of head displacement, lip distance, lip opening displacement, lip opening velocity, chin opening displacement and chin opening velocity. Although this is no doubt an interesting discussion, the reader may wonder why those features are discussed, since none of those parameters is used to delimit the stressed/accented syllables in the analysed words; indeed, as will be mentioned later, one of the most straightforward critiques to the analytical methodology of the study has to do with the impressionistic measurements that it relies on. Clearly, the author foresees the potential criticism that his analytical approach may give rise to when he states, backing his claim with one of Hayes's (Reference Hayes1995) observations, that ‘any researcher can also rely upon his or her own auditory impressions of some syllable in the word under analysis being more prominent than other syllables constituting the same word’ (p. 35). The last section of chapter 2 is devoted to a curious, though somewhat irrelevant, overview of stress placement in different languages in the world.
Chapter 3 (pp. 44–58) presents the methodology used to retrieve stress doublets in English. With regard to dictionary data, the main source was the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), though other dictionaries and a corpus were also used – the Medical Research Council Psycholinguistic Database, the Merriam-Webster Online, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the British National Corpus. Once the stress doublets were located (by hand!), the website YouTube was used to search for videos where those words with variable stress were used by native speakers of English. When comparing the stress doublets in the dictionaries and the realisation of the corresponding words in the videos, further data were encountered. For example, certain words that the OED rendered as stressed/-able only on one syllable (e.g. ˈcomparable) were found to be stressed differently by native speakers (e.g. comˈparable). Conversely, there were cases where a word cited as a stress doublet in the OED (e.g. ˈdesiccate/deˈsiccate) was found to be stressed always on the same syllable (e.g. ˈdesiccate) in the videos.
Although one may agree with the author that analysing a vast amount of data using software such as Praat would be an extremely time-consuming task, there is no doubt that the results obtained would be more reliable, since determining where stress falls in a word in connected speech is by no means a task that can be carried out literally by ear. Moreover, the fact that the people pronouncing the words were native speakers of the language is, at least, debatable, as it would be necessary to profile the informants with regard to questions such as whether they are indeed native speakers of the language/dialect in question, whether they have been exposed to any other dialects of English, as well as to some important sociolinguistic data, namely their age, gender, level of education, and so on. The author does not allude to any of these issues, and they are essential whenever one approaches a topic that crucially depends on the (socio)linguistic profile of the informants.
Chapter 4 (pp. 68–133) discusses stress assignment rules. The chapter opens with some considerations related to the (un)predictability of stress assignment in English. The view that stress assignment is completely unpredictable, supported by a number of studies, entails that ‘the location of stress in English words is simply stored in English speakers’ mental lexica’ (p. 68). Contrary to this, there appears to be sound evidence to support the view that stress assignment largely responds to the so-called ‘Normal Stress Rule of the English language’ (p. 68). Other approaches to the issue are the rule-based approach, associated with a computational model of stress assignment, and a mixed-type approach, which accepts the existence of stress-assignment rules in English without denying the possibility of stress also being lexically stored, in which case the existing rules are ‘redundancy rules’ (Hayes Reference Hayes1995). Bearing in mind the diversity of the existing approaches to stress assignment, the volume concentrates on providing possible answers to the question why English words are stressed the way they are, dividing those words by number of syllables. Thus, the chapter devotes separate sections to monosyllables, disyllables and words formed by three or more syllables, paying attention to cross-varietal differences.
A number of interesting observations are made with regard to words containing more than one syllable. Disyllabic words tend to be stressed on the penult – on the ult and the penult if they are disyllabic compounds (e.g. armchair, farewell) – while ‘a disyllabic word that is perceived by an English speaker as a foreign word is likely to receive final rather than initial stress’ (p. 70). There are some other cases that contradict the general tendency of penultimate stress in disyllabic words, namely cases of stress preservation of a longer English word – what the author terms ‘synchronic back-derivation/shortening’ – and cases of root stress which falls on a segmentally longer final syllable, unless this syllable is a suffix. Thus in the case of disyllabic words, stress assignment is directly linked to etymological, morphological and phonological questions. Similarly, stress assignment in words of three or more syllables is largely conditioned morphologically and responds to the same principles as stress in disyllabic words, namely ‘stress preservation in suffixation and back-derivation, respecting root-prefix boundaries, reluctance to place stress upon actual suffixes and suffix-like strings, segmental length principle, and stress clash avoidance’ (p. 125).
Chapter 5 (pp. 134–97) is devoted to case studies, i.e. in-depth explanations of particular cases that illustrate the stress-doublet phenomenon. The chapter is divided into two main sections devoted to stress doublets in the OED and in YouTube. It starts with some preliminary observations, namely that ‘many polysyllabic English words for which only one stress pattern is given in dictionaries are as a matter of fact pronounced with more than one stress pattern’ (p. 135), and that although it would appear that words with stress doublets are more typical of American English than they are of British English, ‘this is not the case’ (p. 137). The first section covers the analysis of 7,628 entries with stress doublets according to morphological category and English language variety. The second section attempts to explain ‘why in the case of English words with stress doublets (in the OED), one stress pattern is as a rule more frequently used … than an alternative stress pattern’ (p. 170). The author regards as valid only those results obtained for words that were pronounced by at least ten different native English speakers in the videos explored. After drawing a comparison between the OED data and the analysis of the doublets in the videos, the he concludes that the most common stress assignment tendency is morphologically conditioned, i.e. it has to do with how a particular speaker analyses the morphological structure of a word at a given point in a given context. For example, arˈchetypal/ˈarchetypal in the OED is always pronounced ˈarchetypal by native speakers – 163 times in 131 different videos – because it is analysed as morphologically compounded by arche- and -typal, which explains the assignment of the stress to the initial syllable of the first string. There are some examples that do not respond to the morphological makeup of a given word, although the author ends up providing potential morphological explanations for the prevalence of one of the two possible stress assignment patterns. For instance, ˈextant/exˈtant are found in the videos with similar frequencies of use; the first option is explained in semantic terms, as extant is the opposite of extinct, which carries final stress, while the second option is explained by reference to -tant being taken as a suffix that repels stress.
Chapter 6 (pp. 199–204) presents the concluding remarks. To start with, it points out that this study differs from others in that ‘all stress assignment tendencies identified in it are based on the analyses of all polysyllabic English words’ (p. 199). Secondly, it states that ‘English still remains a … Germanic language as far as its stress system is concerned’ (p. 199), since ‘from the point of view of stress, contemporary English is actually more similar to the genuine Germanic languages Icelandic and Faroese than it is to other modern Germanic languages, such as, e.g. German’ (p. 199). Although the evidence suggests that English follows the Germanic stress rule, there are some cases that do not seem to follow that general rule, namely the relatively often attested cases where penultimate stress is assigned to words or components of morphologically complex words that end orthographically in < a, o, i>, due to Italian or Spanish influence. Thirdly, it concludes that stress placement in polysyllabic words depends on morphological structure, and the question that must be answered is, then, ‘how this structure is determined by English speakers’ (p. 201). Thus, polysyllabic words with non-initial stress are stressed according to two main principles, namely, the string on the right receives stress when that same string occurs in at least one other existing word, and that string is segmentally longer than the string on the left, which is either unstressed or receives secondary stress. This prefixation analysis, which very often responds to erroneous etymological judgements on the speakers’ part, entails that many trisyllabic words receive penultimate stress (as they are interpreted as being formed by a monosyllabic prefix and a disyllabic root), while tetra- and pentasyllabic words are only rarely stressed on the penult, a pattern that is not observed in hexasyllabic and longer words. Related to this is the view that back formation must be viewed as a synchronic phenomenon which on many occasions has a crucial impact on stress assignment: ‘[t]he recognition of the fact that a shorter English word may even synchronically be secondary to a longer one is key to understanding why the stress of the former is sometimes not preserved in the latter’ (p. 202). This chapter insists on the idea that the variability of stress doublets in English is conditioned by the morphology of the word in question. In sum, there are five main analytical solutions that give rise to the attested types of stress doublets, namely back derivation and suffixation, back derivation and prefixation, suffixation and prefixation, compounding and prefixation, and prefixation and morphological simplicity. With regard to the connection between morphology and stress assignment, the volume lacks a few ‘classical’ references, such as Giegerich's works on stress and morphology (Reference Giegerich1985, Reference Giegerich1992, Reference Giegerich2009, Reference Giegerich, Cyran, Kardela and Szymanek2012), as well as some works dealing with the connection between morphology and rhythm in stress assignment phenomena (Liberman & Prince Reference Liberman and Prince1977), and prosody (Selkirk Reference Selkirk1980; Nespor & Vogel Reference Nespor and Vogel1986; Nespor Reference Nespor and van der Hulst1999).
In the very last section of the concluding chapter, the author leaves room for future research, pointing to the necessity to include the frequency criterion in certain doubtful cases, as well as taking into account the existence of stress doublets for words that are not attested in the OED and analysing them using tools such as YouTube.
All in all, this research work opens new research paths for scholars interested in the interface between morphology and phonology as well as those working on stress in spoken language, and will no doubt be of invaluable help to any person concerned with the amazingly rich research possibilities within the realm of stress-related phenomena in English.
