Hypercorrection?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:43 PM -0400 5/20/05, Wilson Gray wrote:
>"She called my emploYER [Employ^r]." I.e. Stress is on the final
>syllable. This looks like an overcorrection based on the stress
>pattern of "employee," which didn't occur in the course of the
>exchange.
>--
>-Wilson Gray

Well, at least that one is plausible as a way of stressing the
paradigmatic contrast you note (even when the syntagmatic contrast is
absent), as well as a case of paradigmatic influence, much as with
the now standard pronunciation of "covert" to rhyme with "overt"
(instead of being a voiceless-final twin of  "covered" the way it
used to).  The one that really puzzles me is "defendANT", with stress
(or at least secondary stress and non-reduction of the vowel) in the
final syllable, as used in legal lingo.  Was this originally to set
it off from "defendER"?  I can't figure it out.

Larry