Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
ice cream, iced coffee, ice milk, ice tea, ice water
These and other combinations with ice[d] display some interesting changes currently in progress: if primary stress is on the first word, then we know we have a compound; if it’s on the second word, then we still have an adjective or noun adjunct modifying a noun. Older Americans (for whom ice cream was once only an infrequent homemade Sunday novelty) may well recall when it was spelled iced cream, in full recognition, through the participial adjective iced, of both process and chief ingredient. But younger Americans, who know only the product and may never have seen a hand-cranked freezer or, for that matter, a cow, today would find the participial spelling (and the occasional hyphen) odd indeed. And the pronunciations reflect the difference. The dental suffix on iced is gone from everyone’s pronunciation, of course. But in some of the younger speakers the primary stress is on the first word—EIS-KREEM and EIS-kreem-KON—whereas older Americans may still say EIS-KREEM and eis-KREEM-KON. Several such compounds or near-compounds are currently in divided usage for either or both pronunciation and spelling: EIS-TEE (ice tea) is usually stressed on tea, but the dental suffix that once was on the end of ice has disappeared from both pronunciation and spelling. Iced coffee, on the other hand, retains the participial dental suffix both in some speech and in nearly all spelling, probably because this beverage is a much more recent development than ice tea. Ice water usually lacks the dental suffix today and is usually stressed on the first element. Though some uses of it may not ever have had that d, ice[d] milk is clearly too new to be a compound: the stress is still on milk. Mash[ed] potatoes and handicap[ped] parking are two other examples.
