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Word length and the location of primary word stress in Dutch, German, and English

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Published/Copyright: May 13, 2008
Linguistics
From the journal Volume 46 Issue 3

Abstract

This study addresses the extent to which the location of primary stress in Dutch, German, and English monomorphemic words is affected by the syllables preceding the three final syllables. We present analyses of the monomorphemic words in the CELEX lexical database, which showed that penultimate primary stress is less frequent in Dutch and English trisyllabic than quadrisyllabic words. In addition, we discuss paper-and-pencil experiments in which native speakers assigned primary stress to pseudowords. These experiments provided evidence that in all three languages penultimate stress is more likely in quadrisyllabic than in trisyllabic words. We explain this length effect with the preferences in these languages for word-initial stress and for alternating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The experimental data also showed important intra- and interspeaker variation, and they thus form a challenging test case for theories of language variation.

Mirjam Ernestus, MPI for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail:
Received: 2004-02-20
Revised: 2005-06-10
Published Online: 2008-05-13
Published in Print: 2008-May

© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

Articles in the same Issue

  1. The semantics of particles: advantages of a contrastive and panchronic approach: a study of the polysemy of French déjà and Italian già
  2. Word length and the location of primary word stress in Dutch, German, and English
  3. What about a (really) minimalist theory of language acquisition?
  4. A constructionist approach to complementation: evidence from Ancient Greek
  5. The enclitic -mm in Amharic: reassessment of a multifunctional morpheme
  6. The later development of an early-emerging system: the curious case of the Polish genitive
  7. Book reviews
https://doi.org/10.1515/LING.2008.017

Articles in the same Issue

  1. The semantics of particles: advantages of a contrastive and panchronic approach: a study of the polysemy of French déjà and Italian già
  2. Word length and the location of primary word stress in Dutch, German, and English
  3. What about a (really) minimalist theory of language acquisition?
  4. A constructionist approach to complementation: evidence from Ancient Greek
  5. The enclitic -mm in Amharic: reassessment of a multifunctional morpheme
  6. The later development of an early-emerging system: the curious case of the Polish genitive
  7. Book reviews
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