Lesson Four, Norms

Word stress

Serbo-Croatian word stress is highly intricate - it should be mastered by listening to native speakers and sound recordings. This task certainly remains outside the scope of this course. However, it is useful to conceptually grasp the categories of Serbo-Croatian word stress, as well as the rules and restrictions which guide their usage. There are two parameters of word stress that are of interest here. First, one has to know where to place the stress, and, secondly, one needs to know the nature of the stress.

Although stress placement changes within the inflectional forms of one word, and is not bound to a particular syllable, there is an important restriction preventing the stress from being placed on the last syllable. Given the fact that the majority of word forms have two syllables or less, their stress is already determined. Also, many words with three or more syllables bear the word stress on their first syllable. It is therefore a good strategy to always put the stress on the first syllable. This will yield a certain number of mistakes, but they can be corrected by listening to sound recordings and native speakers and noting the situations where the stress is not on the first syllable.

The nature of Serbo-Croatian word stress is far more complicated than is its placing. The following table shows possible values of Serbo-Croatian stress and the signs used above the accented vowel to mark them (only in specialized linguistic publications):

	Present		Absent
	Falling	Raising
Long	^	/
Short	\\	\	-

The following table provides examples. Click on each word to hear it. The difference between long and short unaccented vowels can be seen in the last vowel of the word vojnika:

	Present		Absent
	Falling	Raising
Long	Luka	luka	vojnika
Short	vodu	voda	vojnika

A good strategy to master thsee differences is to practice with minimal pairs, i.e. the pairs that differ only in one parameter of the stress. Here are several examples. Click on the links below to practice. Again, your goal is not to master the differences but to be able to recognize vowels under different stress values:

Difference	Example 1	Example 2	Sound Wave
Present:Absent	Edina 'Ed's'	Edina 'Edina (female name)'
Short:Long	dug 'long'	dug 'debt'
Falling:Raising	Luka 'Luke'	Luka 'port'

Sentence prosody

Serbo-Croatian sentence prosody is by-and-large congruent with its English counterpart. One should remember that prosody raises toward the end of a sentence when asking questions and enumerating.