© 1991 by Oxford University Press
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Compound word stress
taught for many years in the Overseas Education Unit at Leeds University, where he is concerned with teacher-education courses for English teachers. He has had many overseas visits and has been involved in consultancies, running courses, workshops, and seminars on behalf of the University, The British Council, and the Overseas Development Administration, in most parts of Africa and also parts of South East Asia and East Asia, as well as Europe and the Middle East. He has published on aspects of English pronunciation and phonology, on teacher-education for language teachers, and on communicative competence and its relation to language teaching.
Stress in English compound words poses difficult problems for foreign learners. English does not seem to be at all consistent in the way it treats compounds, either from the point of view of writing or from the point of view of pronunciation and especially stress. If we look at how this uncertainty and inconsistency arises we can perhaps understand better the difficulties. And if we look beyond the principles of word stress to the principles of accent placement, and in so doing pay attention to the information structure of compounds, we can obtain valuable guidance about stress placement in these words.