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Variably stressed ‘-ion’-words

It is well-known that the suffix -ion "invariably throw[s] the stress on to the syllable preceding [it]" (Kingdon 1949, 148); e.g., attriˈbution, compenˈsation, evoˈlution, etc. A lesser known fact is that in addition to being stressed ˌevoˈlution (Oxford Dictionaries, henceforth OD), with primary stress regularly occurring upon the syllable preceding -ion, evolution is also pronounced /ˈɛvəluːʃ(ə)n/ (OD), with the secondary stress of ˌevoˈlution being promoted to primary stress. The same applies to compensation, for which the second edition of Upton and Kretzschmar’s The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (henceforth RDPCE) gives only the regular stress pattern ˌcompenˈsation (2017, 256). But in YouTube videos containing the spoken occurrences of this word, there is also the stress pattern ˈcompenˌsation, with stronger stress occurring initially rather than penultimately. Apart from variably stressed -ion-words such as compensation and evolution, which involve an interchange of primary and secondary stress, there are also variably stressed -ion-words such as humiliation, in which secondary stress interchangeably occurs upon different syllables. That is, /hjʊˌmɪlɪˈeɪʃn/ or /ˌhjuːmɪlɪˈeɪʃn/ (RDPCE 2017, 627), with secondary stress being either pen-initial or initial. To the best of my knowledge, students of English stress have thus far not paid any attention to these empirical facts; that is, there does not seem to exist a single study that is specifically concerned with variably stressed -ion-words such as compensation, evolution, humiliation, etc. What follows below is thus an attempt to fill in the research gap.