Pronunciation Pieces are short, light articles, each one usually focusing on an English word or phrase that illustrates a feature of phonetic or linguistic interest. They originally appeared in the series ‘Words of the Week’. They cover a wide range of topics include weak forms, contractions, linking R, T-epenthesis, G-dropping, T-glottaling, compound stress, rhoticity, vowel linking, aspiration, T/D-deletion, TH-fronting, tricky word stress, numerals, tricky spellings, negative transfer, pronouncing foreign words, accents of English, numerals, intonation, accentuation, word endings, prefixes and many others.

My sweet lover

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heart-979523_640A student recently told me that her husband was a sweet lover. But the way she said it conveyed a different meaning from the one she intended. She meant to tell me that he loves sweets, but her pronunciation suggested that he’s a sweet kind of lover.

If we accentuate lover after the word sweet, then English speakers are likely to understand this as a lover described by the adjective sweet. So sweet LOVER means ‘lover who is sweet’. (Sweet may or may not also be accentuated.)

But if we combine two nouns into a compound in which the second does something to the first, then we accentuate only the first noun. So SWEET lover means ‘lover of sweets’, with sweet used here as a noun. My student intended this second meaning, but accentuated lover. It’s the non-accenting of a final noun which speakers of many languages find so difficult.

Here are some examples of adjective-noun phrases and compound nouns:

  frustrated LOVER (lover who is frustrated)

 

  desperate LOVER (lover who is desperate)

 

  CAT lover (lover of cats)

 

  BOOK lover (lover of books)

Of course this doesn’t only apply to the examples with lover. Here are further examples with other nouns. As before, the noun is accentuated if it’s described by a preceding adjective, but not accentuated if it does something to a preceding noun:

  serious PLAYER (player who is serious)

 

  BASKETBALL player (player of basketball)

 

  effective USER (user who is effective)

 

  FACEBOOK user (user of Facebook)

 

  motivated SELLER (seller who is motivated)

 

  BOOK seller (seller of books)

 

Further notes

In all the examples above, the final noun is based on a verb: love, play, use, sell. In other compound nouns, the meaning relation may be one in which the second noun ‘does something to’ the first (e.g. RIOT police, FIREman) but often isn’t (e.g. INTEREST rate, WINDOW ledge, SNOWman).