query: lexical stress in acronyms

[Paul Hopper]

One little further point on alphabetisms: 

A group of Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts students might be referred to as:

all 'B.As and 'M.A.s (with contrastive stress on the first elements, where in isolation they would be B.'A., M.'A). This is like German 'PKW und 'LKW.)

But suppose we need to call a meeting of a group consisting of all Master of Arts students and all Teaching Assistants. Is this group:

all 'M.A.s and 'T.A.s
or
all M.'A.s and T.'A.s?

Does it make any difference how the abbreviation is unpacked?

Paul





> 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/
> 
>