- Reported in “Stress and Information,” American Speech XXXIII (1958), 11. My feeling about these now is that they represent the same kind of nominalization that is almost universally applicable to one-syllable verbs: dash, run, shake, spill, drive, turn—even verbs like sow, pray, send, pry, and dine have been used in the sense of ‘act of—ing.’ Their tendency to equalize the semantic range of the verb and noun—in contrast to the semantic narrowing of forms like leanto, turnout, brushoff, shoo-in, pérvert, cómbinesuggests that they are the English counterpart of the infinitive used as a verbal noun (one, that is, which can have adnominal modifiers, as the infinitive with to cannot), though it does not have quite the dual status that it enjoys in some other languages since many polysyllabic infinitives cannot be used as nouns. It is not difficult to imagine it being said of a gossip that He specializes in the quick tell, or of somebody showing annoyance that He has an irk on; but indispose and communicate can scarcely be used as nouns.
- For the different kinds of pitch movement by which a syllable may be obtruded, see Bolinger, “A Theory of Pitch Accent in English,” Word XIV (1958), 109–149, esp. §7.
- “Pitch Accent,” §5. The flanking unaccentable provides a foil for the accent even when a competing syllable is undegraded, as happens with the -post of compost, the can- of canteen, etc. It is not a phonetic but a repertorial cue, one that comes from lexical storage. Our experience with citation forms and other instances where the word is in a favorable position with respect to accent (e.g., This is called a canteen) tells us that the syllable can- is unaccentable; and this helps to mark -teen as accented in an ambiguous situation like There are of course phonetic cues as well, in the shape of degraded syllables. Since accented syllables are always undegraded, any suggestion of degradation immediately marks the syllable affected as unaccented. Mostly degradation has to do with length—the degraded syllable is shortened and this in turn leads to a centralizing of the vowel. But there is no precise rule for this. In the object pronouns him and her, for example, at times there is neither loss of length nor centralization of vowel; here, the consistent mark of degradation is loss of the [h]. So in with no difference except [h] versus zero, the first is accented on kill (an “anticipated A” accent—see “Pitch Accent,” top of p. 143), the second on him (a normal A accent).
- An accent marked by an upward skip in pitch. See “Pitch Accent,” §7.
- The Intonation of American English. University of Michigan, 1945, pp. 59–60.
- An accent marked by being jumped down from (and often up to or down to as well). See “Pitch Accent,” §7.
- Unless, of course, wild flowers has a contrastive accent on wild with flowers de- accented.
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