The genesis of terminational stress in english

• Published in: Lingua 1981-01, Vol.54 (4), p.335-359
• Main Author: Poldauf, Ivan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/0024-3841(81)90010-3

English, with its mixed lexicon, non-Germanic loans, and Germanic-Romance hybrids, subjected its uncompounded word stock to rules typologically acceptable to the speaker. The stock had gradually become more and more dependent on the ends of the words, or ‘finals’, classifiable by their stress-determining behaviour, in particular on their classification into open sets and closed sets (the latter also merely expandable). The terminational stress used as its basis conditioning ‘suffixes’ of the typologically domestic Germanic kind, agglutinative, or it used an innovation, namely the movable common stress, sufficiently characterizing a word's loan character. Semi-agglutinative stress partly blurs the glueing-on attachment of finals. Sporadically, Latin influence is brought in among the inherited or developed patterning by specialist terminology. The new stress developed from the alternation of stresses under pressure from unstressed verbal or adjectival ‘initials’ which were typological replacements of the Germanic unstressed prefixes. - Fixed stress developed owing to the prevalence of or relatedness to certain word types, frequently supported by potential initial stressing in attributes and owing to the loss of a mora in the pronunciation of certain finals. - Scientific terms stressed initially also made their pattern felt. Superadded to bipartite words, common stress has occasionally created new finals. Terminational stress is the most fortunate solution of the situation in a lexically well-balanced hybrid language.