Wilbur A. Benware: Wo liegt denn der Akzent nun eigentlich? Wörter mit Akzentschwankung in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache

A comparison of non-inflected polysyllabic words (adverbs and particles) from various dictionaries of contemporary German shows widely diverging views on the placement of the accent. A selection of words having two stressable constituents (labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’) showed that accent-determining factors are distributed unevenly across the corpus, and include the speech act, eurhythmy and the Principle of the Last Stressable Syllable, according to which the B-constituent is accented before a prosodic boundary. Also occurring are a “zero accent” (neither A nor B) and an emphatic accent (A and B). The default accent in all cases is A.