Well… at least for pronunciation.

.

Every now and then, when I’m teaching, I come across a phenomenon for which I had never found any comprehensive teaching material. I’ve been teaching English for 11 years, so you can guess my amazement (and relief) when I finally bumped into it on Wikipedia.

.

Some words, when pronounced with a different stress have a grammatical change: stress the first syllable and you’ll be saying a noun; stress another, and you’ll mean anything else (a verb, an adjective…)

that’s what happens with words like:

• conflict.

as a verb, “I hope that won’t conFLICT in any way.”

as a noun, “There will be no CONflict.”

• record.

as a verb, “Remember to reCORD the show!“.

as a noun, “I’ll keep a RECord of that request.”

• permit.

as a verb, “I won’t perMIT that.“

as a noun, “We already got a PERmit.”

.

the phenomenon is called Inicial Stress Derived Noun, and you can find all about it on wikipedia