Stress in multi-word noun phrases
October 17th, 2007
I have been struggling with the rules for stress in noun phrases. I don’t know how I failed to learn this at some previous time but I did.
It’s obviously extremely valuable to be able to give rules but are there any which are sufficiently productive to be useful?
This is my thinking at the moment:
NOUN NOUN compounds have primary stress on the first noun.
Examples: ‘oil rig, ‘coal mine; su’pport system; ‘car factory
ADJECTIVE NOUN phrases have primary stress on the noun.
Examples: global ‘warming; educational a’chievement; tall ‘person
Even when you add more words before these root phrases, the primary stress obeys these rules. Thus:
NOUN / ADJECTIVE + NOUN NOUN will have the stress on the first noun of the noun noun compound:
Examples: North Sea ‘oil rig; ancient ‘coal mine; Honda ‘car factory
NOUN/ADJECTIVE + ADJECTIVE NOUN will have the stress on the noun.
Examples: reduced global ‘warming; graduate educational a’chievement; exceptionally tall ‘person
Do these ‘rules’ seem right? I can think of a few exceptions immediately, like car ‘door. Is this because we sometimes think of the noun as an adjective?
Of course, all these stress ‘rules’ apply to the neutral or unmarked phrase. If I want to talk about my black cat, I will say I have a black ‘cat. but to distinguish one of two cats I can say, Look at the ‘black cat.
Also the University Grammar of English gives a nice example, contrasting ‘toy factory = a factory making toys and toy ‘factory = a toy which is a factory.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Thank you very much for this valuable peice of information. I’m very interested in that area of phonology and I’d like to know more and more about it.
October 18th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
I’ll post more as I think of them! I think a lot of the published information in this area is fascinating but unteachable. I’m trying to find ‘rules’ which are easy and sufficiently productive to be worth teaching.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Hello Terry,
I hear some teachers calling themselves teachers of English while others say English teachers. As far as I know we are teachers of English, but English teachers are native English people. please could you explain to me more this point.
October 26th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I think both are acceptable in this case. Personally, I think anyone, native or non native, who teaches English can call themselves an English teacher. In the UK, for example, we call people who teach French at secondary school ‘French teachers’ and there is no suggestion that that are, in fact, French.
October 28th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Hello Terry and all bloggers reading this. It was so nice to actually read something on these lines as i have been teaching for over 12 years and haven’t really come across anything of this nature concerning ‘Rules’ pertaining to stress in any kind of phrase. There are some sites on the internet where you can go to find syllable patterns, but for stress patterns in noun or adjectives phrases I haven’t found any yet, but as we all know the internet will cough up something sooner or later.
Anyway, keep bloging on any subject to do with teaching as I think we all find it interesting and informative; even sometimes beneficial!
Oh and Terry, I’d love to access this site for the teachers material…..if possible.
many thanks all and blog to you soon ( as I say
)
Abdulkareem
October 30th, 2007 at 9:27 am
I am no expert on this, but it is a fascinating subject. And an important subject: if you’ve ever watched CNN’s World Report, you’ll know that it’s very possible for people whose English is very ‘good’ actually to be almost incomprehensible, because their sense of rhythm and stress is so undeveloped. (Of course, native speakers can read aloud badly, too.) I suspect that any attempt to find formal rules will be very frustrating, because, as with other elements of spoken discourse, the essential determining agent of choice is a communicative one, as we see in the toy factory and black cat examples. The same goes for ‘French teacher’. In the sentence ‘I’ve just met the new French teacher’, the stress will be different according to whether the teacher is of French nationality (stress on French) or is a teacher of the subject ‘French’(stress on teacher). Of course, she might be a new French teacher from France…
October 30th, 2007 at 10:20 am
I think the point about stress and rhythm rendering good grammatical structure incomprehensible is an absolutely key one. I also agree that suprasegmental work in this area is likely to fail - at least as far as teachability goes. I never got my head around tone groups, for example. But something as simple as making sure that words and phrases are correctly stressed will go a long way to improving comprehensibility.
Did anyone else every play the game with this sentence:
“The Robinsons are renting the one bedroom flat on the second floor” (It’s in O’Connor or one of those) The idea is to get students to stress the sentence in different ways to mean e.g. not the Smiths, not buying, not the two bedroom flat.
November 1st, 2007 at 1:13 pm
“I never got my head around tone groups” ‘Tis music to the ears to hear you say that. I thought it was just me… That might be just a good example of how academic analysis does not necessarily lead to pedagogical utility. And on the subject of usefulness, I wonder who coined the term ‘ENOP’, which you use in your induction notes (some fascinating stuff there, btw). I first came across it from a Malaysian colleague in the early 80s.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I think the feeling of being the only one who doesn’t understand something in ELT is very common - when in fact, we are all in the dark about most things!
I do agree that academic analysis doesn’t necessarily lead to pedagogical utility but I also feel that a lot of the recent work of e.g. Pinker and William Calvin on how the brain makes language should have affected our methodology and hasn’t, by and large. Also of course the work of Paul Nation on vocabulary.
ENOP is a lovely term but I don’t know who coined it either.