One of the notable characteristics of Japanese-accented English is the misplacement of the nuclear stress on a wrong word in certain syntactic categories. In the present paper, the nature of this misplacement is examined in terms of the learner's covert linguistic knowledge as well as overt production, which results in a typology consisting of four different types. Based on this typology, it is discussed that the learners are not homogeneous with respect to the knowledge and the production, and that the nuclear stress (mis)placement itself reflects a rather complex interaction between phonology, pragmatics, and possibly syntax.