Complex word stress

Complex words

The nature of stress was explained and some broad general rules were given for deciding which syllable in a word should receive primary stress. The words that were described were called "simple" words; "simple" in this context means "not composed of more than one grammatical unit", so that, for example, the word 'care' is simple while 'careful' and 'careless' (being composed of two grammatical units each) are complex; 'care fully' and 'carelessness' are also complex, and are composed of three grammatical units each. Unfortunately, as was suggested, it is often difficult to decide whether a word should be treated as complex or simple. The majority of English words of more than one syllable (polysyllabic words) have come from other languages whose way of constructing words is easily recognizable; for example, we can see how combining 'mit' with the prefixes 'per-', 'sub-', 'com-' produced 'permit', 'submit', 'commit' - words which have come into English from Latin. Similarly, Greek has given us 'catalogue', 'analogue', 'dialogue', 'monologue', in which the prefixes 'cata-', 'ana-', 'dia-', 'mono-' are recognizable. But we cannot automatically treat the separate grammatical units of other languages as if they were separate grammatical units of English. If we did, we would not be able to study English morphology without first studying the morphology of five or six other languages, and we would be forced into ridiculous analyses such as that the English word 'parallelepiped' is composed of four or five grammatical units (which is the case in Ancient Greek). We must accept, then, that the distinction between "simple" and "complex" words is difficult to draw.

Complex words are of two major types:

ii) words made from a basic word form (which we will call the stem), with the addition of an affix; and

iii) compound words, which are made of two (or occasionally more) independent English words (e.g. 'ice cream', 'armchair').

We will look first at the words made with affixes. Affixes are of two sorts in English: prefixes, which come before the stem (e.g. prefix 'un-' + stem 'pleasant' —> 'unpleasant') and suffixes, which come after the stem (e.g. stem 'good' + suffix '-ness' —> 'goodness').

Affixes have one of three possible effects on word stress:

a) The affix itself receives the primary stress (e.g. 'semi-' + 'circle' ʃз:kl —> 'semicircle' 'semɪsз:k_.l; '-ality' + 'person' 'pз:sn —> 'personality' pз:sṇ'æləti).

b) The word is stressed as if the affix were not there (e.g. 'pleasant' 'pleznt, 'unpleasant' ɑn'pleznt; 'market' 'mɑ:kɪt, 'marketing' 'mɑ:kɪtɪŋ).

c) The stress remains on the stem, not the affix, but is shifted to a different syllable (e.g. 'magnet' 'mægnət, 'magnetic' mæg'netɪk).