The Arden Reference Grammar

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The stress

Stress is phonemic. Save for a bunch of exceptions, stress always falls on the penultimate or on the last syllable of a word. This alternation is based upon a rule of morphology. Inflections make the stress shift rightwards, but attached clitics don't move the seat of the stress.

In irregular words with antipenultimate stess, the stress moves to the penultimate syllable when the word is inflected or is followed by an enclitic. Irregular words with word-final stress turn to the regular alternation between penultimate and word-final stress when they are inflected.

In the orthography, penultimate stress is always unmarked. Unstressed monosyllables are also unmarked. In the other cases, the seat of the stress is marked by means of the acute accent in the Western script, or the grave accent in the Eastern script.

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