query: lexical stress in acronyms

[Jan Anward]

In Swedish, l-by-l acronyms with 3 letters have stress on the lfinal  
syllable (LFG, USA, PKK, …), whereas l-by-l with two letters have  
stress on the initial syllable (FN, BG, TT, …). I am currently away  
from my books, but I beleve someone has written an article about  
this. I'll check t when I get back home, in mid-August.

Best,

Jan


26 jul 2007 kl. 08.55 skrev David Gil:

> 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
>
> -- 
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistics
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
>
> Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
> Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
> Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/



________________________________________________________
Jan Anward
Professor
Department of Culture and Communication
Linköping University
581 83 Linköping
Sweden
Tel: +46 13 28 40 37
Fax:+46 13 28 28 10
jan.anward at liu.se
http://www.liu.se/isk/research/jan/

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