Abstract
This paper seeks to find factors that contribute to the speed of stress shifts in prefixed disyllabic noun-verb pairs of Romance origin. Phillips’ hypotheses on word frequency correlations and her “lexical analysis” are discussed. Comparisons on word frequencies from 3 corpora, entry date and entry status in relation to stress patterns have been carried out on 252 N-V pairs from 12 prefixes in American and British English. Gradient percentages of words with noun entry status are found in present-day paroxytonic, diatonic and oxytonic pairs in four sets of data; no such correlations are found with respect to word frequency or entry date. Noun entry status facilitates the Romance loans’ adaptation to the “noun-Initial, verb-Final” stress pattern of Old English.
