Obstruents
Many thanks to all those who responded (listed below).
The main reason put forward for a possible explanation of this stress pattern
was analogy with other “ob-“ words such as obstruct, obtain, observe, etc, all
of which have second syllable stress.
John Wells, however, pointed to another pattern which one would suppose
might have blocked the one just referred to; that is, the influence of other “-
uent” words, such as affluent, congruent, constituent (and similar such as
radiant, variant, etc). (By the way, thanks to John for putting this on his
blog.)
My main reason for wondering whether I’d missed a US pronunciation,
however, is the fact that the speaker is a speech pathologist of over 20 years
experience (and thus trained, we’d hope, to listen really carefully to speech)
and a current doctoral student (thus, we’d hope, having encountered the
word in question reasonably often), coupled with the fact that I’d been using
the word in doctoral seminars over several weeks....
Maybe this realization was influenced by the stress pattern in 'disfluent'?
A couple of other points: thanks to Bob Ladd for reminding me that, of course,
DEbris (as opposed to d@BRIS) is actually a British English stress shift back
from the French original.
And thanks to Natasha Warner for allowing me to share some annoying
student pronunciations/versions of phonetic terms. These include forMANT,
FORmat (both for FORm@nt), constonant, approximates, and dipp-thongs......
Thanks go to:
John Wells, John Maidment, Natasha Warner, Bob Ladd, Mark Tatham, David
Ward, Mark Jones, Ian Crookston, and Allard Jongman.
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