Phonology:rules for stress in english

Rules for stress When a word has more than one syllable, one of the syllables is always a little louder than the others. The syllable with the louder stress is the accented syllable. It may seem that the placement of accents in words is often random or accidental, but these are some rules that usually work. 1. Accents are often on the first syllable. Examples: ba'/sic, pro'/gram. 2. In words that have suffixes or prefixes, …

…segmental structure may behave differently. For instance in words like co'operative and co'rroboarative the stress falls on the syllable second before the sufix. Words ending with suffixes such as -ology and -ality have primary stress on the first syllable of the suffix: <Tab/>or-ni-' tho-lo-gy<Tab/> e-, ven-tu 'a-li-ty <Tab/>psy-' cho-lo-gy<Tab/><Tab/>ba-'na-li-ty