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The rules formulated can be understood in two parts: rules of stress regarding two-
syllable words and rules of stress regarding words consisting of three or more
syllables. The main reason for dividing these rules into two parts is that two-
syllables words are mostly simple words (like enter, attract, money, and envy), i.e.,
words consisting of the root only, and words consisting of three or more syllables
are mostly complex words (like refugee, mountaineer, climatic, and economically)
i.e., larger words derived by adding affixes. As will be pointed later, there are
prefixes and suffixes that do not affect the stress pattern of the root but there are
others that do. The view taken for understanding the stress pattern of two-syllable
words should be understood in terms of the vowels, consonants, and consonant
clusters constituting those words, whereas the stress pattern of words consisting of
Two-syllable Verbs
1) If the second syllable of a verb contains (i) a long vowel, (ii) a diphthong
other than /əʊ/, or (iii) a consonant cluster, the stress is on that second
syllable. The following are some examples of two-syllable verbs having a
long vowel in the second syllable.
Br E Am E
dic'tate 'dictate
mig'rate 'migrate
vib'rate 'vibrate
The following are some examples of two-syllable verbs in which the second
syllable ends in a consonant cluster.
a'mend con'sent re'act
af'fix cor'rect ob'ject
se'lect at'tract de'mand
2) Negatively, this rule can be stated as follows:
2
Nouns of Type 1
'country 'culture 'mother
'husband 'money 'college
'product 'student 'taxi
Nouns of type 1 seem to be much larger in number than those of type 2.
Nouns of Type 2
a'larm a'ward re'ward
tech'nique bal'loon di'sease