LINGUIST List 4.586

Wed 28 Jul 1993

Sum: Frequency of Verbal Stress Types

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1. elaine crowder, freq of verbal stress types

I received a prompt answer to my question about frequency of English
verbal stress. Murray Spiegel ran some stats on Webster's 7th on-line
and came up with the following results:

Total verbs: 7121

Ultimate: 3774 (53%)
 Includes 213 with two 1 stresses
 Remainder: 3561 (50%)

Penultimate: 2083 (29%)
 Includes 282 with two 1 stresses
 Remainder: 1801 (25%)

Antepenultimate: 1373 (19%)
 Includes 154 with two 1 stresses
 Remainder: 1219 (17%)

Ante-antepenultimate: 196 (3%)
 Includes 91 with two 1 stresses
 Remainder: 105 (1%)

The duplicate primary stresses cause the statistics to get more or
less than 100%, depending on how you count them.

When verbs having double primary stress were omitted, the frequency of
antepenultimate verbs having the specified endings were:

ate--556 ize--323 ify--109 aph--17 ute--13 ent--12 yze--11 ise--10
ine--10 ter--7 ade--7 nce--6 ite--5 ose--5 per--4 ram--4 cle--4

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-Elaine