Initial-stress Derivation
Published: 2021-10-28Many English words function as more than one part of speech and are pronounced differently dependnig on the usage. In particular, it is common for verbs to shift their stress to the first syllable when they are used as nouns or adjectives. This process is called “initial-stress derivation”.
If you look at Wikipedia, you will find a list of initial-stress-derived nouns. It includes many words that are fairly elementary, but I found that there are several words that I personally mispronounced or knew only one pronunciation for. So let me share them here, and I hope it will help you review your own understanding of these words.
Before we look at each word individually, let’s first take a look at the entire list and see some of the characteristics.
First of all, and perhaps it goes without saying, some words have a blurry line between the pronunciation of the noun and that of the verb. For example, “research” seems to be pronounced in both ways to function as either a noun or a verb.
There is also the pattern that “when used as a verb, both pronunciations are accepted, but as a noun, only the first-stressed pronunciation is accepted.” For example, PREfix (from now on, I capitalize the stressed position) is accepted as a noun and a verb, but preFIX is used only as a verb. Another example of this pattern is SEGment (noun, verb) and segMENT (verb). I think this is probably because these words are used as nouns much more often than as verbs, and as a result, the first-stressed pronunciation sounds more natural, and some people just use it as a verb as well.
I’ve also found an odd exception. The word “upset” is pronounced upSET as both an adjective and a verb, and UPset as a noun. So it is possible that an adjective and a noun are pronounced differently.
As a Japanese learner, there is one thing to keep in mind. There are several katakata nouns in Japanese that are derived from these words but stressed differently. For example, コンソール, アップグレード, リライト, and リメイク are pronounced like conSOLE, upGRAGE, reWRITE, and reMAKE, respectively, but these pronunciations cannot be used as nouns in English. (See the word list below).
This is the end of the post for today, but I think there are more things to write, so I’ll probably edit this post later on.
The words mentioned above
All information below is based on the U.S. pronunciation in the Oxford English Dictionary.
console
- console, n.: CONsole
- console, v.: conSOLE
prefix
- prefix, n.: PREfix
- prefix, v.: PREfix, preFIX
remake
- remake, n.: REmake
- remake, v.: reMAKE
rewrite
- rewrite, n. and adj.: REwrite
- rewrite, v.: reWRITE
research
- research, n.: REsearch, reSEARCH
- research, v.: REsearch, reSEARCH
re-search (meaning “search again”)
- re-search, n: reSEARCH
- re-search, v.: reSEARCH
segment
- segment, n.: SEGment
- segment, v.: SEGment, segMENT
upgrade
- upgrade, n. and adv.: UPgrade
- upgrade, v.: UPgrade, upGRADE
upset
- upset, n.: UPset
- upset, adj. and v.: upSET