Sophie Herment

Making sense of nonce word stress in English

This chapter presents the findings of an experiment testing native speakers’ intuition about the stress of disyllables. Similar experiments have been carried out for Spanish (Barkanyi, 2002) and for Italian (Kramer, 2009), languages similar to English in that they also display stress patterns conditioned by either phonology (syllable weight, see Hyman, 2003/1985) or morphology (language-specific lexical properties, see Hulst, 1999 or 2011 for a review), and at the same time different in that the English lexicon is much less homogeneous and is clearly split into Germanic and Romance words, two distinctly behaving sets.