Stress pattern of '-acy' words in English

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to find out the stress pattern of English words with '-acy' ending. According to Dickerson and Hahn (1999), English nouns with '-acy' ending are supposed to have a stress on the preantepenultimate like celibacy, but words like democracy have a stress on the antepenultimate and are treated as an exception. This paper attempts to explain the two different stress patterns of '-acy' words by sorting out 204 English words with this ending and argues that they are not an exception but a regular pattern which can be explained if we see their morphological structure of the word. The result shows that out of 204 words 4 diysllabic and 16 trisyllabic words always have a stress on the first syllable while 84 tetrasyllabic words are divided into two different types, antepenultimate or preantepenultimate stress, which I explain with the idea Elsewhere Condition and morphological structure. The rest of penta-, hexa- and hepta-syllabic words also can be explained in the same way as the tetrasyllabic ones.