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.

Objective: adjective

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skip_adA word that’s very often mispronounced by non-natives is the noun adjective. Natives put the main stress at the beginning, Ádjective. But non-natives tend to skip the initial ad- and put the main stress in the middle, adjÉctive. Here are examples of the native pronunciation:

  the adjective


  you’ve got an adjective


  the adjective ‘British’


  take an adjective


  the adjective ‘teary’


  the adjective that went first



The non-native mistake isn’t surprising. For one thing, most three-syllable nouns beginning ad- have a weak first vowel and the main stress in the middle, e.g.

advÁntage, advÉnture, admÍrer, addÍction, admÍssion, adhÉsive, adjÚstment, advÁncement

Those with initial stress are less common, e.g.

Ádmiral, Ádvocate, Ádditive, Ádenoid

The pattern with words ending -ective is even clearer. Whether nouns or adjectives, these generally have the main stress in the middle, e.g.

objÉctive, perspÉctive, detÉctive, dirÉctive, subjÉctive, effÉctive, protÉctive, respÉctive, reflÉctive, selÉctive

As far as I’m aware, adjective is the only one with initial stress.

For comparison, here are examples of objÉctive used by natives:

  this is our objective


  the main objective


  there’s objective clairaudience


  to try and be objective as possible.



Further notes

The second syllable of adjective can contain any one of three vowels, /ɪ/, /ə/ or /ɛ/.

The penultimate stress of words like adventure and admirer and the antepenultimate stress of words like advocate and admiral is related to the fact that the middle syllable is ‘heavy’ in the former but ‘light’ in the latter.