query: lexical stress in acronyms

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Dear David,
what about German, where stress of letter-by-letter acronyms may vary, 
e.g. 'FDP or FD'P (Freie Demokratische Partei) etc.?  I'm not sure under 
which conditions speakers of German tend to move the stress towards the 
beginning (accommodating the acronyms to German stress patterns), but  
I'm left with the impression, that 'FDP bears lexical stress, whereas 
FD'P retains the phrasal stress pattern of the underlying phrase. Hence 
'FDP would be more 'wordy' than FD'P. It would be good to know how 
languages with N-ATTR order would handle the stress pattern of a 
corresponding letter-by-letter- acronym in case N carries phrasal 
stress. In French, N-ATTR normally has its phrasal stress on ATTR (e.g. 
défense atlanTIque) and hence phrasal stress and lexical stress merge 
into e.g. D.'A. But I do not know of N-ATTR languages that have both an 
'N-ATTR pattern (phrasal stress on N) and letter-by-letter acronyms 
emerging from N-ATTR patterns... I guess others will know....
Best wishes,
Wolfgang

David Gil schrieb:

> Dear all,
>
> I'm interested in patterns of lexical stress in a specific type of 
> acronym -- let's call them letter-by-letter acronyms -- whose 
> pronunciation consists of each letter bearing its own individual name, 
> eg. English US [yu:es], LFG [elefji:], etc.  (Not all languages have 
> letter-by-letter acronyms, for example Hebrew does not.)
>
> In two languages that I'm familiar with, English and Papuan Malay, 
> word stress is commonly or predominantly penultimate; however, 
> letter-by-letter acronyms invariably place the stress on the last 
> syllable, eg. [yu:ES], [elefJI:].  Is this a coincidence, or is there 
> a general principle at play here?  (One might perhaps wish to argue 
> that the final stress is phrasal rather than lexical, but in other 
> respects these acronyms behave like single words.)
>
> I'd appreciate any comments, data from other languages, and 
> bibliographical references to stress patterns in letter-by-letter 
> acronyms.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>

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Prof. Dr. Wolfgang 
Schulze                                                                    

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