Stress Patterns of Compound Nouns in English

영어 복합명사의 강세형

Stress assignment has been much discussed in the literature on English compound nouns. The general view of the stress pattern of English compound nouns is that a main stress falls on the first element and a secondary stress on the second element; however, a stress pattern is often employed that provides counterevidence to the traditional pedagogical approach. A new idea is suggested by Ladd(1984) that 'compound stress represents the deaccenting of the head of the compound.' Recent studies show that initial stressing does not indicate compounds and syntactic phrases are not always characterized by final stressing. In his pilot test Pennanen comments on the frequent variation of stress patterns on individual items, on the basis of which Bauer confirms Pennanen's results with different informants. This paper is an attempt to justify Bauer's analysis with the same data as Bauer's and different subjects. It turns out that the competences of native-speaker informants do not rovide clear-cut answers. Some factors should be taken into account in assigning appropirate stress to compound nouns.