Speak Right; Sound Right. 4-SYLLABLE STRESS PATTERN by Benson Arome Get full audio here Today, I’ll like us to look at some 4-syllable words and their stress pattern. You may already know the how to pronoun some of the words we are looking at. What you may not know is why you pronounce them the way you do. Now the stress in four-syllable words is mostly either on the second, or on the third syllable. But we also have some 4-syllable words with their stress on either the first or the last syllable. Now let us look at some rules guiding the stress pattern of 4-syllable words. The second syllable is generally stressed if the word ends in ‘-cy’, ‘-ty’, ‘-phy’, ‘-gy’ ‘-fy’ and ‘-ate’. Examples are: ‘-cy’ - dependency, democracy, illiteracy, , supremacy ‘-ty’ - equality, atrocity, necessity, complexity, intensity ‘-phy’ - photography, philosophy, bibliography, geography, ‘-gy’- analogy, biology, pedagogy, phonology, psychology ‘-fy’ - inten...