🔗 Initial Stress-Derived Noun

🔗 Linguistics

Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but it is not present in all. The list of affected words differs from area to area, and often depends on whether a word is used metaphorically or not. At least 170 verb-noun or verb-adjective pairs exist. Some examples are:

• record.

as a verb, "Remember to recórd the show!".

as a noun, "I'll keep a récord of that request."

• permit.

as a verb, "I won't permít that."

as a noun, "We already have a pérmit."