Pearõhu asukoht ja seda mõjutavad tegurid eesti keele võõrsõnades
Primary stress location and its factors in Estonian loanwords

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates the primary stress location in the Estonian loanwords containing a third-quantity (Q3) syllable or a long vowel in a non-initial position. Although Estonian typically features a fixed initial stress, these specific loanwords can carry stress either on the initial syllable or on the heavy non-initial syllable. Because Estonian lexicographical tradition leaves this stress unmarked, it creates challenges for language learners and speech synthesis. To identify the factors influencing stress placement in these words, we analysed two lexical resources (the dictionary of the Estonian morphological parser Vabamorf and a speech corpus containing 31 215 word forms recorded by a single speaker), and conducted a perception experiment with 356 participants evaluating 42 test words.The results indicate that this type of loanwords constitue 27% of simplex words in the Vabamorf dictionary and that 85% of such words have non-initial stress in the word form corpus.A primary factor of stress location is the number of syllables in the base form; initial stress is most preferred in trisyllabic words, whereas non-initial stress is overwhelmingly preferred in five-syllable and longer words. The position of the heavy syllable also plays a crucial role: initial stress is precluded if the heavy syllable is the second one but favoured if it is the third and final syllable. Furthermore, word frequency significantly impacts stress; higher frequency correlates with a stronger preference for initial stress.Regarding morphological paradigms, the study found that stress location is a lexical property of the lemma; inflected forms typically retain the stress of the base form regardless of the number of syllables in the specific form. Finally, the research reveals moderate inter-speaker variation influenced by age, with younger speakers showing a higher tolerance for initial stress compared to older generations.

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