Vowel Quality and English Verb Stress

Abstract

In this paper, vowel distributions of 3260 English monomorphemic verbs are examined to verify the claim that vowel height plays a considerable role in stress assignment in English. The claim was made by research on English nouns from a lexical database, CELEX(Baayen, Piepenbrock and Gulikers, 1995). It has found that vowel quality, especially vowel height, has a significant influence on stress location. Results of the current study provide further evidence for the claim that vowel height is related to stress location: First, lowness attracts stress; Second, a high front lax vowel, [?], is the second frequent vowel in unstressed syllables following a schwa.; Third, in stressed light syllables, a mid vowel, [?], appears most frequently while a low vowel [ae] is the most common vowel winning stress over a heavy syllable. These findings offer insights into the relations between phonetic properties of vowel phonemes and the nature of stress.