Prosodic features

Lexical stress placement

Lexical stress in New Zealand English largely conforms to the pattern of RP. A few differences have been noted, such as spectator, dictator and frustrate stressed on the first syllable, and agriculture variably on first or third, as well as a tendency towards strong secondary stress in words ending in -ary/-ory. Some of these patterns may be attributable to the influence of other Englishes on New Zealand English such as Scottish English, or possibly American English in the case of spectator, dictator and frustrate.

Unpublished studies of bisyllabic verb/noun pairs such as import and survey show that these also largely conform to the pattern of second syllable stress for verbs and first syllable stress for the noun, with the qualification that stress placement for the verb forms appears to be more variable.