Word stress

Word stress differences in ChcE are idiosyncratic to the individual. These most often appear in compound words, such as Thanksgíving Day (unstressed day), mòrning síckness, typewríter, shów up, but also in polysyllabic words, as in réalized, ássociate, téchnique. Some time ago, Penfield (1984) suggested that ChcE compounds are stressed on the second word, rather than the first as they would be in most other English dialects. Of course, this does not capture the facts of the vast majority of ChcE word compounds that exhibit typical English stress patterns.

In phrasal stresses (across a breath group or some other set of words), Fought notes that main stress may occur at unexpected places. She offers (2003: 71) two sentences (main stress boldfaced) from a U.S.-born 16-year-old Chicano: Some girls don’t think what they’re gonna go through. It’s all right for her to talk to her homeboys, but it ain’t all right for me to talk to my homegirls? Fought states that this pattern would be only “marginally acceptable” to many speakers of other English dialects. She goes on to say it has many parallels to ELL stress patterning – again a substrate-influenced pattern. Fought points to potentially useful directions in ChcE prosody research, namely testing system-level hypotheses, and moving away from lists of word-stress anomalies, to characterizations of larger units of prosody.