Stress Variation in British and American English

Abstract

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of lexical‐stress variation in British and American English. A comparison of the pronunciations of all 75,000 entries in Wells's dictionary yields 932 stress‐divergent words. This set is found to differ from the entire lexicon in three respects of which the first appears to be more important than the others. The average frequency of the words is lower and their average length is higher. Furthermore, proper nouns are overrepresented. Generally, main stress falls further to the left in British than in American English, with the latter variety accommodating stress more in the word edges than the former. Lexical type (proper vs. common nouns) and origin (French vs. non‐French) form categories which are differentially treated in the two dialects. Stress variation occurs in monomorphemic as well as polymorphemic words. Endings which play a variable role in the stress‐assignment process include 〈‐ate〉, 〈‐ess〉, 〈‐ist〉, 〈‐ive〉, 〈‐ly〉 and 〈‐ory〉. Variation can also be observed in compounds and zero‐derived items. In all these lexical sets, stress‐identical words outnumber stress‐divergent ones. With some reservation, a case is made for regarding British English as the more rhythmical of the two varieties. It is argued that frequency, or rather the lack thereof, weakens the memory trace for lexical items. This destabilization paves the way for variation by allowing different forces to act on the same words.