Following up on my buttocks posting, Wilson Gray reminded people on ADS-L on June 21 that some people pronounce buttock(s) with a secondary accent on the final syllable (as if it were a compound), rather than with the unaccented final syllable that’s recorded in all the dictionaries I’ve seen.
Perhaps the pronunciation comes from interpreting the spelling as representing a compound, and perhaps also from treating the word as unfamiliar and therefore resistant to deaccenting — the opposite of the Familiarity Breeds Deaccenting principle that I mentioned in an April posting on metrical feet (a principle evidenced, for example, in “insider” pronunciations of the state names Wisconsin and Oregon).
I haven’t a clue as to the social or geographical distribution of this variant; it could be sporadic.
I’m sure I’ve heard other examples in which a normally unaccented syllable is elevated to secondary accent. (This is a separate phenomenon from accent shifts, where there is variation as to which syllable in a word gets the primary accent.) For the moment the prime example that comes to my mind is a British vs. American difference in the treatment of a final -ard in family names (like Willard, Woolard, and Pollard): this syllable is unaccented in American English, but British speakers regularly (though not, I think, invariably) give it a secondary accent.
(Additional complexity: I’m sure I’ve come across British speakers who have Willard as a family name with secondary accent on the final syllable, but Willard as a personal name — think of Willard Scott — with an unaccented final syllable.)
(Further complexity: Some British speakers use the secondary accent for British family names, but reproduce the preference of Americans with -ard family names — like the linguist Carl Pollard — for an unaccented final syllable.)
