Eintrag

Titel

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

Personen

Mirjam Ernestus, Anneke Neijt

Jahr

2008

Typ

Aufsatz

Periodikum

Linguistics
An interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences

ISSN

0024-3949

Seiten

507 - 540

Heft

3

Sprache(n)

Deutsch
Englisch
Niederländisch

Schlagwörter

Kontrastiv
Silbe
Wortakzent

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.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/35714