English and French have totally different views of stress, hence the frequency of errors.
Vaissière (2002: 6) describes how French speakers perceive stress: “The notion of (lexical)
stress is indeed very elusive for French natives. They only discover the existence of that
unnatural and unnecessary complication when they have to learn a foreign language”. Still,
French learners must be aware of the existence of lexical stress in English, as it is a very
different feature from their L1, but also a very important feature for intelligibility. As a
matter of fact, it is one of the few prosodic features of English pronunciation that are taught
in French secondary schools, albeit still rarely. That is probably because lexical stress is
directly linked to some segmental features – e.g. reduced forms of function words and the
schwa. The way the French system differs from the English one can be summarized by
Henry, Bonneau and Colotte’s (2007) remark:
The French lexical accent is essentially correlated to a lengthening of the last
syllable of the word. Thus French learners will tend to keep this lengthening to
English realizations even on unstressed syllables. […] The English lexical accent
is strongly marked on an acoustical point of view whereas the French one is
relatively weak. […] English lexical accent is characterized by a pitch
modification, an increase of intensity and a lengthening of the vocalic nucleus of
the stressed syllable. (1595)
As is specified here, the transfer of the L1 pattern on the L2 production is almost systematic
and unconscious with French speakers, who simply assign equal stress and weight to all
syllables when they speak English. These mis- (or non-)realizations of English stresses can be
illustrated by the widespread overuse of the English word people in French, with the
restricted meaning of “celebrity(ies)”. In this word, apart from the gallicization going as far
as using un people (“a celebrity”) and des people(s) (“celebrities”), the influence of the French
prosodic system made the word be pronounced as /pi’poel/, or even /pi’p?l/(6), in which the
vocalic reduction – i.e. to a schwa /?/ or a syllabic consonant /l?/ – in the second syllable has
been replaced by a typically French full vowel. Similarly, in polysyllabic words ending in
-age (e.g. village, sausage), French speakers very often use a tense vowel /e?/ and stress the
ending, which at the same time is possibly due to the influence of the word age /’e?d?/. This
example illustrates how such a suprasegmental feature as lexical stress may be at the origin
of segmental errors. Hodges (2006) illustrates the difficulties that French learners come
across through the series of words derived from ‘democrat: demo’cratic, de’mocracy. Even
though all three words are closely related, both semantically and morphologically, several
stress rules (e.g. the stress-imposing ending -ic, and the Greek origin of the components)
force the lexical stress to fall on a certain syllable, and that is something that French learners
do not understand easily.
Comprehensibility can be affected by errors involving lexical stress (McNerney &
Mendelsohn, 1992). With stress-alternating pairs, e.g. ‘present vs. pre’sent, the primary stress is
on the first syllable if the disyllabic word is an noun or an adjective, but it is on the second
syllable if the word is a verb. When the two words are closely related (e.g. ‘absent vs. to ab
‘sent, an ‘insult vs. to in’sult), understandability cannot be overly affected by misplacement of
the stress. However, when the two words are only homographs, but in no way related (e.g.
present), a native English speaker might have to think a little before realizing what word was
intended. Similarly, when a compound stress, such as in ‘English ?teacher (= a teacher who
teaches English), can involve a confusion with a simple phrase stress pattern (adjective +
noun), such as ‘English ‘teacher (= a teacher who is English), French learners make errors that
have an impact on understandability. As a consequence, native speakers might simply stop
communication by dint of mental corrections. It is therefore crucial that teachers should
teach the correct stress pattern of a word immediately when the word is first learned, as is
suggested by Roach (2009: 76): “it would be easier to go back to the idea of learning the stress
for each word individually”.
Even beyond the correct understanding of a word, the primary and secondary stresses of
English words contribute to the overall rhythm of the language. If they are not realized
properly, the whole rhythm is spoiled, English melody is broken, and communication can
become even harder.