Stress – Understanding Prosodic Stress

The stress you sense actually reflects your own assumption about what the writer of each sentence intends to emphasize. This is in no way fixed or consistent. There is no rule about where to put the stress in such a phrase. If any stress is placed, it is placed on the part the writer wants to emphasize. Here's an easy way to look at it: If I wanted to emphasize that the last sentence pertained to a YOUNG man, I could stress that word and not put ANY stress on any of the others.

Don't forget that the idea of stressing any of these words comes primarily from spoken inflections, not from any intrinsic structure of a "four word phrase," which isn't a known, recognized, or established grammatical entity. In your examples, in fact, you are linking sets of words that really bear no grammatical linkage. The first is a four-word proper name, the second is a three-word proper name preceded by an adjective, and the third is a single noun preceded by two adjectives, one of which is modified by an adverb. Therefore, "four-word phrase" in no way defines what we are looking at here, and we would have no expectation that the stresses WOULD fall in the same place.