“Word stress” is the term used to describe the accent or emphasis given to a particular syllable of a word.
Stress can fall on the first, middle or last syllables of words.
We can study stress from the point of view of production and of perception.
-Production of stress depends on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables
-All stressed syllables have one common characteristic: prominence. Stressed syllables are perceived as stressed because they are more prominent than unstressed syllables
what makes a syllable prominent?
Prominence is produced by:
-Loudness
-Length
-Pitch
-Quality
-Facial movements
Loudness
Most people seem to feel that stressed syllables are louder than unstressed.
If one syllable is made louder than the others, it will be heard as stressed.
Length
If one of the syllables is made longer than the others, there is quite a strong tendency for that syllable to be heard as stressed.
Pitch
Pitch in speech is closely related to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds and to the musical notion of low and high-pitched notes.
It's essentially a perceptual characteristic of speech. If all syllables are said with low pitch except for one said with high pitch, then the high-pitched syllable will be heard as stressed and the others as unstressed
Quality
A syllable will tend to be prominent if it contains a vowel that is different in quality from neighbouring vowels.
Facial movements
Stressed syllables may be accompanied by larger jaw, lip and other facial movements by the speaker.
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primary and secondary stress
Longer words, especially when spoken in isolation, may have more than one stressed syllable, in which case one of the stresses is given more force than the other.
Primary stress: the strongest type of stress. Represented in transcription by a high mark just before the affected syllable.
Secondary stress: weaker than primary stress but stronger than a weak syllable. Represented in transcription with a low mark.
There is a third level of stress which can be called “unstressed” and is regarded as being the absence of any recognizable amount of prominence.
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how to select the correct syllable to stress?
Some questions to decide on stress placement:
Is the word morphologically simple, complex (containing one or more affixes) or compound?
What is the grammatical category of the word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)?
How many syllables has the word got?
What’s the phonological structure of those syllables?
weak and strong syllables
It is possible to divide syllables into two basic categories: strong and weak.
Remember: although we do find unstressed strong syllables, only strong syllables can be stressed. Weak syllables are always unstressed.
English stress placement is a highly complex matter.
When English speakers come across an unfamiliar word they can pronounce it with the correct stress.
Therefore it should be possible to discover what it is that the English speaker knows and to write it in the form of rules.
stress in two-syllable words
Either the first of the second syllable will be stressed - not both.
Nouns:
If the second syllable contains a short vowel, then the stress will usually come on the first syllable. Otherwise it will be on the second syllable.
Verbs:
The basic rule is that if the second syllable of the verb is a strong syllable, then that second syllable is stressed.
If the final syllable is weak, then the first syllable is stressed.
A final syllable is also unstressed if it contains the diphthong ’/əʊ/’.
Adjectives:
Stressed according to the same rule as verbs
Other words as adverbs and prepositions seem to behave like verbs and adjectives.
stress in three-syllable words
Nouns:
If the final syllable is weak, or ends with /əʊ/, then it's unstressed.
If the syllable preceding the final syllable is strong, then that middle syllable will be stressed.
If the second and third syllables are both weak, then the first syllable is stressed.
Exception: three-syllable simple nouns. Even if the final syllable is strong , the stress will usually be placed on the first syllable. The last syllable is usually quite prominent, so that in some cases it could be said to have secondary stress
Verbs:
If the final syllable is strong , then it will be stressed.
If the last syllable is weak, then it will be unstressed, and stress will be placed on the penultimate syllable if that syllable is strong.
If both the second and third syllable are weak, then the stress falls on the initial syllable.
Adjectives:
Seem to need the same rule as three-syllable simple nouns.
attention:
The above rules do not, of course, cover all English words. They apply only to major categories of lexical words (nouns, verbs and adjectives), not to function words such as articles and prepositions.
There are many cases of English words with alternative possible stress patterns.
Other words change their stress pattern according to the context they occur in.
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