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Lexical stress is contrastive in English, but when asked to prove that it is, we must be careful. True stress minimal pairs are lot rarer than a lot of people think. By “true stress minimal pair” I mean a pair of words, which mean different things, and differ only in the place of primary lexical stress. An example is insight ˈɪnsaɪt vs incite ɪnˈsaɪt.
The problem is that the stress status of a syllable often determines what vowel occurs in it. Take, for example, the two words export (noun) and export (verb). Yes, they differ in the place of lexical stress, but in many accents, including GBE, the vowel in the first syllable of the noun is e, but in the verb it is something else, ɪ or ə.
Many of the “true” minimal pairs are like import (verb)~ import (noun), where one member is a verb and the other a non-verb (noun or adjective) of related meaning. The non-verb has earlier stress than the verb: so ɪmˈpɔːt vs ˈɪmpɔːt. I don’t think I have ever come across a comprehensive list of such minimal pairs. Maybe you know of one.
Here are a few others I have thought of. Additions welcome.
- discard
- impress
- intern
- misfire
‘incline – in’cline
‘protest – pro’test (= /prəu/)
‘torment – tor’ment
John, you might want to read this:
http://alex-ateachersthoughts.blogspot.it/2012/10/spending-review.html
‘incense – in’cense
‘impact – im’pact
‘insert – in’sert
‘discourse – dis’course
‘affix – a’ffix [at least for some speakers]
‘discount – dis’count [for some]
… and “(he/she/it) proceeds” and “the proceeds”…
There’s an essay aimed at EAL students relevant to this topic but avoiding little-used words on my website.
Jack,
Thanks for that. I’ve edited your second comment to correct the link and zapped the first one.
Cruttenden in his IPE (7th ed.) mentions an unpublished Ph.D. thesis by S. Guierre of 1979, who seemd to have analysed a corpus of >10,000 words of which only 85 were true ‘stress minimal pairs’.
Sorry, Petr, but Lionel Guierre’s initial was not ‘S’. Unfortunately this distinguisht French scholar and very likable person is no longer with us, tho books of his may still be available from some sources.
gənə try to get hold of Lionel’s thesis.
A. A. Hill in his “Stress in recent English as a distinguishing mark between dysllabes used as noun or verb” ( http://www.jstor.org/stable/452400 ) provided a hypothesis on this.
1. Stress shift: this is the case with new nouns derived from old verbs.
2. No stress shift: this is the case with new verbs derived from old nouns.
Lays and Gemmen,
does Hill’s hypothesis stand the acid test?
At least as a trend, it sounds right (and rather trivial). Haven’t read the article, though.
I have been going over my “stress homographs” in search of more. How about discount, invite, increase, insult, quadruple?
“discount, increase, insult, quadruple” all seem fine to me, but “invite” ? Unclear in what context the putative ‘invite stress pattern would occur. All of the others have both nominal and verbal forms, but unless I am missing something obvious “invite” exists only as a verb (and with stress on the second syllable).
Here is the pdf copy of Hill’s paper: http://goo.gl/f2D0P
@ Philip Taylor: “invite” also exists as a noun. See here:
http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/invite_2
From the online version of the OED:
( /ˈɪnvaɪt/ , formerly /ɪnˈvaɪt/ )
Etymology: < INVITE v.: compare command, request, etc.
colloq.
1. The act of inviting; an invitation.
1659 H. L’ESTRANGE Alliance Divine Offices 326 Bishop Cranmer..gives him an earnest invite to England.
1778 F. BURNEY Let. Sept. in Early Jrnls. & Lett. (1994) III. 159 Every body Bowed, & accepted the invite but me..for I have no Notion of snapping at invites from the Great
DWhitecloud, thank you.
JM, AR : thank you. One lives and learns.
Checking my list of stress homographs more carefully I found sixty that fit the definition of pure stress minimal pairs fairly well (with half a dozen doubtful cases where pronunciation may be inconsistent). The full list is on
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/homogrph.html
Obviously this does not pick up cases of different spellings such as incite/insight.
dictate
discard
discharge
discount
discourse
essay (?)
filtrate
fragment (?)
impact
implant
import
impress
imprint
incense
inlay
insert
inset
insult
interchange (?)
intern
invite
mandate (?)
misprint (?)
overbid
overcharge
overflow
overhang
overhaul
overlap
overlay
overprint
overthrow
overwork (?)
prefix (?)
quadruple
re-count
refill
refund
remount
replay
retake
rethink
retread
rewrite
torment
transport
undercharge
undercut
underlay
undertake
upgrade
uplift
upset
And by the way, where did you get that lovely zebra cartoon? Or is it your own work?
John,
Thanks for the list!
As for the cartoon, I’m afraid I no longer remember where I filched it from.
@John Higgins,
A google search for “think it’s stress zebra” will produce several results.