What is word sentence stress

English students often learn syllable and word stress rules before venturing into sentence stress. This is because sentence stress rules are far more variable and complex, while the rules for correct intonation in English generally stay the same. To demonstrate the differences, let’s look at a few different examples of stress in English.

Syllable Stress vs. Sentence Stress

When you learn how to pronounce different vowel and consonant sounds, you must also learn how to stress different parts of a word correctly. Stress is just another way to say “emphasize.” This means that some parts of a word are stronger (and slightly louder) than others. Here are a few examples:

• Away (pronounced: a-WAY)
• Delicious (pronounced: de-LI-cious)
• Anticipate (pronounced: an-TI-ci-PATE)
• Communication (pronounced: comm-un-i-CA-tion)
• Autobiography (pronounced: au-to-bi-O-gra-phy)

Some longer words have a primary stressed syllable and one or more secondary stressed syllables. The primary stressed syllable is always stronger than the secondary stressed syllable, while both are stronger than unstressed syllables. Be sure to check out our guide on stressed and unstressed syllables to learn more about using proper English intonation.

Sentence stress refers to the words in a sentence that get the most emphasis. While common sayings and phrases usually have unchanging sentence stress rules, you can emphasize different words in a sentence to create new meanings. For example, let’s look at the common saying: I told you so!

The most common way to say this phrase is to put the primary stress on “told” and the secondary stress on “so,” like this:

I TOLD you SO!

However, you could also change the implicit meaning of the phrase by emphasizing “I.” By doing this, you will stress the fact that you (the speaker) were the one who told them (the listener) about something. 

Which words should you stress in a sentence?

So, how can you know which words to stress in a sentence? Again, there are no hard-and-fast sentence stress rules, but there are some general principles that will help you use stress properly when speaking in English. You can often tell which words should be stressed based on the parts of speech and where the words fall in a sentence.

• Content words (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and main verbs) are usually stressed.
• Function words (determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions) are usually unstressed unless you want to emphasize their role(s) in a sentence.
• Question words (who, what, when, where, why, and how) are usually unstressed unless you want to emphasize their role(s) in a sentence.
• Subject pronouns (I, You, He, She, We, They) are usually unstressed, while object pronouns (me, you, him, her, us, them) are usually stressed.

Sentence Stress in a Statement

Pronoun	Main Verb	Adverb	Preposition	Determiner	Noun
I	ran	quickly	to	the	desk.
unstressed	unstressed	STRESSED (primary)	unstressed	unstressed	STRESSED (secondary)

This example denotes the natural rise and fall of the sentence. However, as previously stated, you could stress different words to alter the meaning:

• I ran quickly to the desk. (emphasizes who is doing the running)
• I ran quickly to the desk. (emphasizes what action is being done)
• I ran quickly to the desk. (emphasizes the way in which you ran, but does not fundamentally change the meaning of the sentence)
• I ran quickly to the desk. (inappropriate sense stress, but emphasizes the direction in which you ran)
• I ran quickly to the desk. (inappropriate sense stress, but emphasizes that it was a specific desk)
• I ran quickly to the desk. (emphasizes the object or location to which you ran)

Sentence Stress in a Question

Pronoun	Modal Verb	Main Verb	Preposition	Determiner	Noun
Who	will	come	to	the	party?
unstressed	unstressed	STRESSED (primary)	unstressed	unstressed	STRESSED (secondary)

Like the previous example, the sentence stress here also denotes the natural rise and fall of the word combination. However, you could still ask this question six different ways to convey six slightly different meanings:

• Who will come to the party? (you want to know who the party attendees are)
• Who will come to the party? (you want to know who will definitely be attending the party)
• Who will come to the party? (you want to know who will attend the party, but this form does not change the standard meaning of the question)
• Who will come to the party? (inappropriate sense stress, but emphasizes the location of the party) 
• Who will come to the party? (inappropriate sense stress, but emphasizes which party you’re talking about)
• Who will come to the party? (you want to emphasize the party, possibly in contrast to a separate event)

Sentence Stress and Intonation in English

If you couldn’t already tell, sentence stress is often linked to the way our voices rise and fall (intonation) while speaking. The natural rise and fall in pitch usually determines which words are stressed and unstressed. This is why the two example sentences above have similar structures. They are both examples of falling intonation.

In American English, there are two basic types of intonation: rising intonation and falling intonation. Falling intonation is far more common. When you speak with falling intonation, the pitch of your voice starts high and gets lower by the end of the sentence. More often than not, sentences with falling intonation use stressed verbs and objects. For example:

• I saw a crab at the beach.
• They never return my calls.
• Frank is a responsible person.
• My dad doesn’t like to wash the dishes.

Alternatively, rising intonation occurs when the pitch of your voice starts lower and gets higher at the end of the sentence. This type of intonation is less common, but you can use it when you want to ask a Yes/No question or when you want to express a negative emotion, like anger. Similarly, the stress often falls on verbs and objects, though this can vary depending on the meaning you want to convey. Here are some examples:

• Are you sure?
• Do you want to go to the park?
• You’re so mean!
• I don’t want to talk to you!

What is sense stress?

You might have heard of sense stress, which is very similar to the concept of sentence stress. Sense stress simply refers to the use of stress on different words to convey different meanings. Thus, sense stress is a form of sentence stress. Usually, people refer to appropriate or inappropriate sense stress. Appropriate sense stress sounds natural and correctly conveys the meaning of a sentence. Here are some examples of appropriate sense stress:

• How many HAMBURGERS should we get?
• What TIME is it?
• He ANSWERED the phone.
• They did NOT want to go swimming.

Alternatively, inappropriate sense stress sounds unnatural and conveys strange or incorrect meanings. Here are a few examples:

• Where do you want to eat?
• Did you go to the doctor?
• I never go to the supermarket by myself.
• She was watching a movie when the guests arrived.

Conclusion

Sentence stress is an element of English that can be difficult to grasp, especially for beginner or even intermediate learners. However, with practice, you can use stress to accurately express yourself. With time, you’ll find that sense and sentence stress are some of the best ways to get your point across to other English speakers!

If you’d like to hear native English speakers using sentence stress, be sure to subscribe to the Magoosh Youtube channel!

The stress placed on syllables within words is
called word stress or lexical
stress. The stress placed on words
within sentences is called sentence
stress or prosodic
stress. 

Sentence stress is a greater prominence of words which are made more
prominent in the international group. The prominence of accented
words is achieved through the greater force of utterance and changes
in the direction of voice pitch.

Stress in utterance provide the basis for understanding the content,
they help to perform constitutive, distinctive, indemnificatory
function of intonation.

Word stress is definitely the key to understanding spoken English and
it is used so naturally by native speakers of the English language
that they are not even aware they are doing it. When non native
speakers talk to English natives without the use of word stress they
are likely to encounter two problems: 

1. The listener will find it difficult to understand the fast
speaking native.

2. The native speakers may find it difficult to understand the non
native speakers.

Any word spoken in isolation has at least one prominent syllable. We
perceive it as stressed. Stress in the isolated word is termed word
stress, stress in connected speech is termed sentence stress. Stress
is indicated by placing a stress mark before the stressed syllable.

Stress is defined differently by different
authors. B. A. Bogoroditsky,

for instance, defined stress as an
increase of energy, accompanied by an

increase of expiratory and
articulatory activity. D. Jones defined stress as

the degree of
force, which is accompanied by a strong force of exhala­

tion
and gives an impression of loudness. H.
Sweet also stated that stress

is
connected with the force of breath.

Word stress can be defined as the singling out of one or more
sylla­bles in a word, which is accompanied by the change of the
force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative
characteristics of the sound, which is usually a vowel.

1. Theories of syllable formation and syllable division.

The syllable is a complicated phenomenon and like
a phoneme it can be studied on four levels — articulatory, acoustic,
auditory and functional.
The complexity of the phenomenon gave rise to many theories.

We could start with the so-called expiratory
(chest pulse or pressure) theory by R.H. Stetson.
This theory is based on the assumption that expiration in speech is a
pulsating process and each syllable should correspond to a single
expiration. So the number of syllables in an utterance is determined
by the number of expirations made in the production of the utterance.
This theory was strongly criticized by Russian and foreign linguists.
G.P. Torsuyev,
for example, wrote that in a phrase a number of words and
consequently a number of syllables can be pronounced with a single
expiration. This fact makes the validity of the theory doubtful.

Another theory of syllable put forward by O.
Jespersen is generally called the
sonority theory.
According to O. Jespersen, each sound is characterized by a certain
degree of sonority which is understood us acoustic property of a
sound that determines its perceptibility. According to V.A.
Vassilyev the most serious drawback of
this theory is that it fails to explain the actual mechanism of
syllable formation and syllable division. Besides, the concept of
sonority is not very clearly defined.

Further experimental work aimed to description of
the syllable resulted in lot of other theories. However the question
of articulatory mechanism of syllable in a still an open question in
phonetics. We might suppose that this mechanism is similar in all
languages and could be regarded as phonetic universal.

In Russian linguistics there has been adopted
the theory of syllable by LV Shcherba.
It is called the theory of muscular tension. In most languages there
is the syllabic phoneme in the centre of the syllable which is
usually a vowel phoneme or, in some languages, a sonorant. The
phonemes preceding or following the syllabic peak are called
marginal. The tense of articulation increases within the range of
prevocalic consonants and then decreases within the range of
postvocalic consonants.

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Sentence stress, or prominence, is the emphasis that certain words have in utterances. There is a general tendency to place stress in the stronger syllables of content words (e.g. main verbs, nouns, adjectives) rather than on function words (e.g. auxiliary verbs, preposition, pronouns etc.).

Sentence stress results in a particular rhythm the English language having, where not all syllables receive the same emphasis. That is why we tend to refer to the English language as a stress-timed language rather than syllable-timed (i.e. a language where all syllables carry similar weight).

Take the sentence below as an example and try to say it in a natural rhythm:

I’ll go to the cinema next Friday.

You’ve probably emphasized some syllables more than others, and most likely placed greater emphasis on the stressed syllables of the content words, resulting in something like this:

I’ll GO to the CInema next FRIday.

An important implication of that is that, in order for the rhythm to be maintained, it is common for us to “under-pronounce” function words, using their weak forms (e.g. the preposition to is often pronounced /tʊ/ or /tə/, rather than the strong form /tu/ in this context).

Unlike word stress, which tends to be fixed, prominence can vary quite frequently depending on the intention of the speaker. Look at the examples below and say the sentences with emphasis on the highlighted syllables. Compare the emphasis given with their intention in brackets:

I’LL go to the cinema next Friday. (me, not John)

I’ll go to the CInema next Friday. (not to the theatre)

I’ll go to the cinema NEXT Friday. (not this Friday)

I’ll go to the cinema next FRIday. (not next Thursday)

Why should I teach sentence stress?

It might be a good idea to help students notice and practice sentence stress for two main reasons:

• It may help them communicate better, using prominence to emphasize specific parts of the sentence, conveying the intended message more effectively.

• Because they are more aware of how sentence stress is produced orally, learners may be better able to understand fast speech.

How can I include sentence stress in a lesson?

Sentence stress could be dealt with during clarification of language.

Let’s say you are helping students become more aware of how to use the present perfect to describe past experiences. After helping students notice the meaning of the structure, you can board a sample sentence and ask the group what syllables should receive more emphasis. It is also a good idea to provide visual reference by, for example, underlining the stronger syllables:

I’ve never been to China.

I’ve travelled to Poland twice this year.

If you want to spend more time helping learners notice how sentence stress is placed, you could carry out a discovery activity, using a scene from a film, course book audio or any other source of listening input. Take a look at the example below:

1) Ask students to look at the lyrics from the song Price Tag, by British singer Jessie J. For each line, they should underline the syllables that they expect to be stronger.

Seems like everybody’s got a price (3 syllables)

I wonder how they sleep at night (3 Syllables)

When the sale comes first (2 syllables)

And the truth comes second (2 syllables)

Just stop for a minute and smile (3 syllables)

Why is everybody so serious? (3 syllables)

Acting so damn mysterious? (3 syllables)

Got shades on your eyes (2 syllables)

And your heels so high (2 Syllables)

that you can’t even have a good time (3 syllables)

Source: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jessiej/pricetag.html

2) Now students listen to the song and check whether their predictions were correct.

Answer Key:

Seems like everybody’s got a price (3 syllables)

I wonder how they sleep at night (3 Syllables)

When the sale comes first (2 syllables)

And the truth comes second (2 syllables)

Just stop for a minute and smile (3 syllables)

Why is everybody so serious? (3 syllables)

Acting so damn mysterious? (3 syllables)

Got your shades on your eyes (2 syllables)

And your heels so high (2 Syllables)

that you can’t even have a good time (3 syllables)

Source: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jessiej/pricetag.html

3) Learners could practise by clapping or tapping their desks with a regular rhythm (or using an online metronome) and trying to say the lines in a way that each underlined syllable coincides with a clap or beat.

References:

Underhill, A. (1994) Sound foundations: learning and teaching pronunciation. Oxford: Macmillan Education.

Rubens Heredia is an Academic Coordinator, CELTA and ICELT tutors at Cultura Inglesa São Paulo and one of the co-founders of What is ELT?

What is sentence stress?

Sentence stress (also called prosodic stress) refers to the emphasis placed on certain words within a sentence. This varying emphasis gives English a cadence, resulting in a natural songlike quality when spoken fluently.

Sentence stress is generally determined by whether a word is considered a “content word” or a “function word,” and the vocal space between stressed words creates the rhythm of a sentence.

Content Words vs. Function Words

In the most basic pattern, content words will always be stressed, while function words will often be unstressed. Let’s briefly discuss the difference between the two.

Content words

A content word (also known as a lexical word) is a word that communicates a distinct lexical meaning within a particular context—that is, it expresses the specific content of what we’re talking about at a given time. Nouns (e.g., dog, Betty, happiness, luggage), most* verbs (e.g., run, talk, decide, entice), adjectives (e.g., sad, outrageous, good, easy), and adverbs (e.g., slowly, beautifully, never) all have meaning that is considered lexically important.

Content words will always have at least one syllable that is emphasized in a sentence, so if a content word only has a single syllable, it will always be stressed.

(*Auxiliary verbs are specific types of verbs that are used in the grammatical construction of tense and aspect or to express modality—that is, asserting or denying possibility, likelihood, ability, permission, obligation, or future intention. These types of verbs are fixed in their structure and are used to convey a relationship between other “main” verbs, so they are considered function words, which we’ll look at next.)

Function words

A function word (also known as a structure word) is a word that primarily serves to complete the syntax and grammatical nuance of a sentence. These include pronouns (e.g., he, she, it, they), prepositions (e.g., to, in, on, under), conjunctions (e.g., and, but, if, or), articles (e.g., a, an, the), other determiners (e.g., this, each, those), and interjections (e.g., ah, grr, hello).

In addition to these parts of speech, function words also include a specific subset of verbs known as auxiliary verbs, which add structural and grammatical meaning to other main verbs. These include the three primary auxiliary verbs be, do, and have, as well as a number of others known as modal auxiliary verbs, such as can, may, must, will, and others.

Finally, function words, especially those with only one syllable, are commonly (but not always) unstressed in a sentence—since they are not providing lexical meaning integral to the sentence, we often “skip over” them vocally. For example, in the sentence, “Bobby wants to walk to the playground,” the particle to, the preposition to, and the definite article the are all said without (or without much) stress. The content words (Bobby, wants, walk, and playground), on the other hand, each receive more emphasis to help them stand out and underline their importance to the meaning of the sentence.

Sentence Stress vs. Word Stress

While function words are often unstressed in a sentence, those that have more than one syllable still have internal word stress on one of their syllables. For example, the word because has two syllables (be·cause), with stress placed on the second syllable (/bɪˈkɔz/). However, in a sentence with a normal stress pattern, because will have less overall emphasis than the content words around it, which helps maintain the cadence and flow of the sentence in everyday speech.

Likewise, multi-syllable content words will have even more emphasis placed on the syllable that receives the primary stress. It is this syllable that is most articulated within a sentence, with the rest of the word being unstressed like the function words.

Examples of normal sentence stress

Let’s look at some examples, with function words in italics and the primary stress of content words in bold:

• “I have a favor to ask.”
• “Jonathan will be* late because his car broke down.”
• “I’m going to the store later.”
• “We do not agree with the outcome.”
• “Please don’t tell me how the movie ends.”

(*Note that be is technically a content word here—it is the main verb in the phrase will be late—but it remains unstressed like a function word. Because they are often used as auxiliary verbs to form verb tense, conjugations of be are almost always unstressed in sentences irrespective of their technical grammatical function.)

Rhythm

English is what’s known as a stress-timed language, which means that we leave approximately the same amount of time between stressed syllables in a sentence to create a natural cadence. These are sometimes referred to as the “beats” of a sentence.

This rhythm is easier to hear in sentences in which content words and function words alternate regularly, as in:

• “I have a favor to ask.”

Things become more complicated when a sentence has multiple content or function words in a row.

Generally speaking, when multiple function words appear together, we vocally condense them into a single beat, meaning that they are spoken slightly faster than content words on either side.

When multiple single-syllable content words appear together, the reverse effect occurs: a greater pause is given between each word to create natural beats while still maintaining the proper amount of emphasis. (Content words with more than one syllable are usually not affected, since at least one part of the word is unstressed.)

Let’s look at one of our previous examples to see this more clearly:

• “Jonathan will be late because his car broke down.”

After the first syllable of the content word Jonathan is stressed, the words will be and the last two syllables of Jonathan are all unstressed and spoken together quickly to form a beat before the next content word, late. The next two words, because his, are also unstressed and spoken quickly to form the next beat. The next three words, car broke down, are all content words, and they are each stressed separately. Because of this, we add a slight pause between them to help the rhythm of the sentence sound natural.

This rhythmic pattern between stressed and unstressed words occurs when a sentence is spoken “neutrally”—that is, without any additional emphasis added by the speaker. However, we can add extra stress to any word in a sentence in order to achieve a particular meaning. This is known as emphatic stress.

Emphatic Stress

The convention regarding the stress and rhythm of content words and function words is consistent in normal (sometimes called “neutral”) sentence stress. However, English speakers often place additional emphasis on a specific word or words to provide clarity, emphasis, or contrast; doing so lets the listener know more information than the words can provide on their own. Consider the following “neutral” sentence, with no stress highlighted at all:

• “Peter told John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.”

Now let’s look at the same sentence with emphatic stress applied to different words, and we’ll see how its implied meaning changes accordingly:

• “Peter told John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.” (Clarifies that Peter, as opposed to someone else, told John not to make the deal.)
• “Peter told John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.” (Emphasizes the fact that John had been told not to make the deal but did so anyway.)
• “Peter told John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.” (Clarifies that John was told not to make the deal, not someone else.)
• “Peter told John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.” (Emphasizes that Peter said the deal was not allowed, indicating that John thought or said the opposite.)

Representing emphatic stress in writing

In writing, we normally use the italic, underline, or bold typesets to represent this emphasis visually. Italics is more common in printed text, while underlining is more common in handwritten text.

Another quick way to indicate emphatic stress in writing is to put the emphasized word or words in capital letters, as in:

• “Peter TOLD John that a deal like this wasn’t allowed.”

This is much less formal, however, and is only appropriate in conversational writing.

What is Sentence Stress?

Words in a sentence are not all given the same salience in oral English. Some words are picked out and are stressed in contrast to others. The one that is the most stressed is said to receive the sentence stress. This usually implies differences in meaning. In the following sentences, the sentence stress is indicated in bold case. Consider the difference in meaning for each of these scenarios.

Sentence Stress Illustrated:

Sentences	Meaning
1. I don’t think she would write it.	I don’t think that, but someone else does.
2. I DON’T think she will listen to him.	It is not true that I think that.
3. I don’t THINK she will listen to him.	I don’t think that, I know that. Or: I don’t think that, but I could be wrong.
4. I don’t think SHE will listen to him.	I think that someone other than her will listen to him.
5. I don’t think she WILL listen to him.	I think that she will not be willing or agreeable to listening to him.
6. I don’t think she will LISTEN to him.	Instead of listening, she might talk to him.
7. I don’t think she will listen to HIM.	I think that she will listen to someone else than him.

Now listen to the sentences to hear the differences:

As you can see, the sentence stress depends a lot on the context. It is closely related to the meaning.

Sentence Stress Rule

Usually:

• Content words are stressed (words that still have some meaning if you put them out of context: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.)
• Grammatical words are not stressed (words that help structure a sentence in English but that do not really have some meaning if you put them out of context: a, an, the, is, etc.)

But, as in the examples above, even grammatical words can be stressed in some specific contexts.

 Sentence Stress Cartoon

Click here or on the image below to read a funny example of how sentence stress can be used to convey different meanings.

 Sentence Stress Exercise

Do this short exercise to check if you can recognize sentence stress!

2. Try saying this word as though you have been completely taken by surprise: for example, SYLlabus? baNAna? kangaROO? 

These three content words carry the most important ideas in the sentence. Unstressed words tend to be smaller words which we need in order to make our language hold together. They help the sentence “function” and for this reason they are called function words. 

Content Words	Function Words
Main Verbs	go, talk, writing	Pronouns	I, you, he ,they
Nouns	student, desk	Prepositions	on, under, with
Adjectives	big, clever	Articles	the, a, some
Adverbs	quickly, loudly	Conjunctions	but, and, so
Negative Aux. Verbs	can’t, don’t, aren’t	Auxiliary Verbs	can, should, must
Demonstratives	this, that, those	Verb “to be”	is, was, am
Question Words	who, which, where

Now, say this sentence aloud and count how many seconds it takes:

The beautiful Mountain appeared transfixed in the distance.

Time required? Probably about 5 seconds. Now, try speaking this sentence aloud: 

Мы рассмотрели правила и примеры постановки ударений в английском языке. Чтобы узнать больше об английской грамматике, читайте другие публикации в разделе Grammar!

For other uses, see Stress.

Primary stress
ˈ◌
IPA Number	501
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ˈ
Unicode (hex)	U+02C8

Secondary stress
ˌ◌
IPA Number	502
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	​ˌ
Unicode (hex)	U+02CC

In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone.^[1][2] The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent.^[3] When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.

Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress solely phonetically.

The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress. Some languages have fixed stress, meaning that the stress on virtually any multisyllable word falls on a particular syllable, such as the penultimate (e.g. Polish) or the first (e.g. Finnish). Other languages, like English and Russian, have lexical stress, where the position of stress in a word is not predictable in that way but lexically encoded. Sometimes more than one level of stress, such as primary stress and secondary stress, may be identified.

Stress is not necessarily a feature of all languages: some, such as French and Mandarin, are sometimes analyzed as lacking lexical stress entirely.

The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. That is one of the three components of prosody, along with rhythm and intonation. It includes phrasal stress (the default emphasis of certain words within phrases or clauses), and contrastive stress (used to highlight an item, a word or part of a word, that is given particular focus).

Phonetic realization[edit]

There are various ways in which stress manifests itself in the speech stream, and they depend to some extent on which language is being spoken. Stressed syllables are often louder than non-stressed syllables, and they may have a higher or lower pitch. They may also sometimes be pronounced longer. There are sometimes differences in place or manner of articulation. In particular, vowels in unstressed syllables may have a more central (or «neutral») articulation, and those in stressed syllables have a more peripheral articulation. Stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes, the difference is minimal between the acoustic signals of stressed and those of unstressed syllables.

Those particular distinguishing features of stress, or types of prominence in which particular features are dominant, are sometimes referred to as particular types of accent: dynamic accent in the case of loudness, pitch accent in the case of pitch (although that term usually has more specialized meanings), quantitative accent in the case of length,^[3] and qualitative accent in the case of differences in articulation. They can be compared to the various types of accent in music theory. In some contexts, the term stress or stress accent specifically means dynamic accent (or as an antonym to pitch accent in its various meanings).

A prominent syllable or word is said to be accented or tonic; the latter term does not imply that it carries phonemic tone. Other syllables or words are said to be unaccented or atonic. Syllables are frequently said to be in pretonic or post-tonic position, and certain phonological rules apply specifically to such positions. For instance, in American English, /t/ and /d/ are flapped in post-tonic position.

In Mandarin Chinese, which is a tonal language, stressed syllables have been found to have tones that are realized with a relatively large swing in fundamental frequency, and unstressed syllables typically have smaller swings.^[4] (See also Stress in Standard Chinese.)

Stressed syllables are often perceived as being more forceful than non-stressed syllables.

Word stress[edit]

Word stress, or sometimes lexical stress, is the stress placed on a given syllable in a word. The position of word stress in a word may depend on certain general rules applicable in the language or dialect in question, but in other languages, it must be learned for each word, as it is largely unpredictable. In some cases, classes of words in a language differ in their stress properties; for example, loanwords into a language with fixed stress may preserve stress placement from the source language, or the special pattern for Turkish placenames.

Non-phonemic stress[edit]

In some languages, the placement of stress can be determined by rules. It is thus not a phonemic property of the word, because it can always be predicted by applying the rules.

Languages in which the position of the stress can usually be predicted by a simple rule are said to have fixed stress. For example, in Czech, Finnish, Icelandic, Hungarian and Latvian, the stress almost always comes on the first syllable of a word. In Armenian the stress is on the last syllable of a word.^[5] In Quechua, Esperanto, and Polish, the stress is almost always on the penult (second-last syllable). In Macedonian, it is on the antepenult (third-last syllable).

Other languages have stress placed on different syllables but in a predictable way, as in Classical Arabic and Latin, where stress is conditioned by the structure of particular syllables. They are said to have a regular stress rule.

Statements about the position of stress are sometimes affected by the fact that when a word is spoken in isolation, prosodic factors (see below) come into play, which do not apply when the word is spoken normally within a sentence. French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, but that can be attributed to the prosodic stress that is placed on the last syllable (unless it is a schwa, when stress is placed on the second-last syllable) of any string of words in that language. Thus, it is on the last syllable of a word analyzed in isolation. The situation is similar in Standard Chinese. French (some authors add Chinese^[6]) can be considered to have no real lexical stress.

Phonemic stress[edit]

With some exceptions above, languages such as Germanic languages, Romance languages, the East and South Slavic languages, Lithuanian, as well as others, in which the position of stress in a word is not fully predictable, are said to have phonemic stress. Stress in these languages is usually truly lexical and must be memorized as part of the pronunciation of an individual word. In some languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Lakota and, to some extent, Italian, stress is even represented in writing using diacritical marks, for example in the Spanish words célebre and celebré. Sometimes, stress is fixed for all forms of a particular word, or it can fall on different syllables in different inflections of the same word.

In such languages with phonemic stress, the position of stress can serve to distinguish otherwise identical words. For example, the English words insight () and incite () are distinguished in pronunciation only by the fact that the stress falls on the first syllable in the former and on the second syllable in the latter. Examples from other languages include German Tenor ([ˈteːnoːɐ̯] «gist of message» vs. [teˈnoːɐ̯] «tenor voice»); and Italian ancora ([ˈaŋkora] «anchor» vs. [aŋˈkoːra] «more, still, yet, again»).

In many languages with lexical stress, it is connected with alternations in vowels and/or consonants, which means that vowel quality differs by whether vowels are stressed or unstressed. There may also be limitations on certain phonemes in the language in which stress determines whether they are allowed to occur in a particular syllable or not. That is the case with most examples in English and occurs systematically in Russian, such as за́мок ([ˈzamək], «castle») vs. замо́к ([zɐˈmok], «lock»); and in Portuguese, such as the triplet sábia ([ˈsaβjɐ], «wise woman»), sabia ([sɐˈβiɐ], «knew»), sabiá ([sɐˈβja], «thrush»).

Dialects of the same language may have different stress placement. For instance, the English word laboratory is stressed on the second syllable in British English (labóratory often pronounced «labóratry», the second o being silent), but the first syllable in American English, with a secondary stress on the «tor» syllable (láboratory often pronounced «lábratory»). The Spanish word video is stressed on the first syllable in Spain (vídeo) but on the second syllable in the Americas (video). The Portuguese words for Madagascar and the continent Oceania are stressed on the third syllable in European Portuguese (Madagáscar and Oceânia), but on the fourth syllable in Brazilian Portuguese (Madagascar and Oceania).

Compounds[edit]

With very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component. Even the exceptions, such as mankínd,^[7] are instead often stressed on the first component by some people or in some kinds of English.^[8] The same components as those of a compound word are sometimes used in a descriptive phrase with a different meaning and with stress on both words, but that descriptive phrase is then not usually considered a compound: bláck bírd (any bird that is black) and bláckbird (a specific bird species) and páper bág (a bag made of paper) and páper bag (very rarely used for a bag for carrying newspapers but is often also used for a bag made of paper).^[9]

Levels of stress[edit]

Some languages are described as having both primary stress and secondary stress. A syllable with secondary stress is stressed relative to unstressed syllables but not as strongly as a syllable with primary stress : for example, saloon and cartoon both have the main stress on the last syllable, but whereas cartoon also has a secondary stress on the first syllable, saloon does not. As with primary stress, the position of secondary stress may be more or less predictable depending on language. In English, it is not fully predictable, but the different secondary stress of the words organization and accumulation (on the first and second syllable, respectively) is predictable due to the same stress of the verbs órganize and accúmulate. In some analyses, for example the one found in Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English, English has been described as having four levels of stress: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary, but the treatments often disagree with one another.

Peter Ladefoged and other phoneticians have noted that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as prosody is recognized and unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction.^[10] They find that the multiple levels posited for English, whether primary–secondary or primary–secondary–tertiary, are not phonetic stress (let alone phonemic), and that the supposed secondary/tertiary stress is not characterized by the increase in respiratory activity associated with primary/secondary stress in English and other languages. (For further detail see Stress and vowel reduction in English.)

Prosodic stress[edit]

Extra stress
ˈˈ◌

Prosodic stress, or sentence stress, refers to stress patterns that apply at a higher level than the individual word – namely within a prosodic unit. It may involve a certain natural stress pattern characteristic of a given language, but may also involve the placing of emphasis on particular words because of their relative importance (contrastive stress).

An example of a natural prosodic stress pattern is that described for French above; stress is placed on the final syllable of a string of words (or if that is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable). A similar pattern is found in English (see § Levels of stress above): the traditional distinction between (lexical) primary and secondary stress is replaced partly by a prosodic rule stating that the final stressed syllable in a phrase is given additional stress. (A word spoken alone becomes such a phrase, hence such prosodic stress may appear to be lexical if the pronunciation of words is analyzed in a standalone context rather than within phrases.)

Another type of prosodic stress pattern is quantity sensitivity – in some languages additional stress tends to be placed on syllables that are longer (moraically heavy).

Prosodic stress is also often used pragmatically to emphasize (focus attention on) particular words or the ideas associated with them. Doing this can change or clarify the meaning of a sentence; for example:

As in the examples above, stress is normally transcribed as italics in printed text or underlining in handwriting.

In English, stress is most dramatically realized on focused or accented words. For instance, consider the dialogue

In it, the stress-related acoustic differences between the syllables of «tomorrow» would be small compared to the differences between the syllables of «dinner«, the emphasized word. In these emphasized words, stressed syllables such as «din» in «dinner» are louder and longer.^[11][12][13] They may also have a different fundamental frequency, or other properties.

The main stress within a sentence, often found on the last stressed word, is called the nuclear stress.^[14]

Stress and vowel reduction[edit]

In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (see stress and vowel reduction in English). The effect may be dependent on lexical stress (for example, the unstressed first syllable of the word photographer contains a schwa , whereas the stressed first syllable of photograph does not /ˈfoʊtəˌgræf -grɑːf/), or on prosodic stress (for example, the word of is pronounced with a schwa when it is unstressed within a sentence, but not when it is stressed).

Many other languages, such as Finnish and the mainstream dialects of Spanish, do not have unstressed vowel reduction; in these languages vowels in unstressed syllables have nearly the same quality as those in stressed syllables.

Stress and rhythm[edit]

Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate that, which contrasts with languages that have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), whose syllables or moras are spoken at a roughly constant rate regardless of stress. For details, see isochrony.

Historical effects[edit]

It is common for stressed and unstressed syllables to behave differently as a language evolves. For example, in the Romance languages, the original Latin short vowels /e/ and /o/ have often become diphthongs when stressed. Since stress takes part in verb conjugation, that has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages. For example, the Spanish verb volver (to return, come back) has the form volví in the past tense but vuelvo in the present tense (see Spanish irregular verbs). Italian shows the same phenomenon but with /o/ alternating with /uo/ instead. That behavior is not confined to verbs; note for example Spanish viento «wind» from Latin ventum, or Italian fuoco «fire» from Latin focum. There are also examples in French, though they are less systematic : viens from Latin venio where the first syllabe was stressed, vs venir from Latin venire where the main stress was on the penultimate syllable.

Stress «deafness»[edit]

An operational definition of word stress may be provided by the stress «deafness» paradigm.^[15][16] The idea is that if listeners perform poorly on reproducing the presentation order of series of stimuli that minimally differ in the position of phonetic prominence (e.g. [númi]/[numí]), the language does not have word stress. The task involves a reproduction of the order of stimuli as a sequence of key strokes, whereby key «1» is associated with one stress location (e.g. [númi]) and key «2» with the other (e.g. [numí]). A trial may be from 2 to 6 stimuli in length. Thus, the order [númi-númi-numí-númi] is to be reproduced as «1121». It was found that listeners whose native language was French performed significantly worse than Spanish listeners in reproducing the stress patterns by key strokes. The explanation is that Spanish has lexically contrastive stress, as evidenced by the minimal pairs like tópo («mole») and topó («[he/she/it] met»), while in French, stress does not convey lexical information and there is no equivalent of stress minimal pairs as in Spanish.

An important case of stress «deafness» relates to Persian.^[16] The language has generally been described as having contrastive word stress or accent as evidenced by numerous stem and stem-clitic minimal pairs such as /mɒhi/ [mɒ.hí] («fish») and /mɒh-i/ [mɒ́.hi] («some month»). The authors argue that the reason that Persian listeners are stress «deaf» is that their accent locations arise postlexically. Persian thus lacks stress in the strict sense.

Stress «deafness» has been studied for a number of languages, such as Polish^[17] or French learners of Spanish.^[18]

Spelling and notation for stress[edit]

The orthographies of some languages include devices for indicating the position of lexical stress. Some examples are listed below:

• In Modern Greek, all polysyllables are written with an acute accent (´) over the vowel of the stressed syllable. (The acute accent is also used on some monosyllables in order to distinguish homographs, as in η (‘the’) and ή (‘or’); here the stress of the two words is the same.)
• In Spanish orthography, stress may be written explicitly with a single acute accent on a vowel. Stressed antepenultimate syllables are always written with that accent mark, as in árabe. If the last syllable is stressed, the accent mark is used if the word ends in the letters n, s, or a vowel, as in está. If the penultimate syllable is stressed, the accent is used if the word ends in any other letter, as in cárcel. That is, if a word is written without an accent mark, the stress is on the penult if the last letter is a vowel, n, or s, but on the final syllable if the word ends in any other letter. However, as in Greek, the acute accent is also used for some words to distinguish various syntactical uses (e.g. té ‘tea’ vs. te a form of the pronoun tú ‘you’; dónde ‘where’ as a pronoun or wh-complement, donde ‘where’ as an adverb). For more information, see Stress in Spanish.
• In Portuguese, stress is sometimes indicated explicitly with an acute accent (for i, u, and open a, e, o), or circumflex (for close a, e, o). The orthography has an extensive set of rules that describe the placement of diacritics, based on the position of the stressed syllable and the surrounding letters.
• In Italian, the grave accent is needed in words ending with an accented vowel, e.g. città, ‘city’, and in some monosyllabic words that might otherwise be confused with other words, like là (‘there’) and la (‘the’). It is optional for it to be written on any vowel if there is a possibility of misunderstanding, such as condomìni (‘condominiums’) and condòmini (‘joint owners’). See Italian alphabet § Diacritics. (In this particular case, a frequent one in which diacritics present themselves, the difference of accents is caused by the fall of the second «i» from Latin in Italian, typical of the genitive, in the first noun (con/domìnìi/, meaning «of the owner»); while the second was derived from the nominative (con/dòmini/, meaning simply «owners»).

Though not part of normal orthography, a number of devices exist that are used by linguists and others to indicate the position of stress (and syllabification in some cases) when it is desirable to do so. Some of these are listed here.

• Most commonly, the stress mark is placed before the beginning of the stressed syllable, where a syllable is definable. However, it is occasionally placed immediately before the vowel.^[19] In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), primary stress is indicated by a high vertical line (primary stress mark: ˈ) before the stressed element, secondary stress by a low vertical line (secondary stress mark: ˌ). For example, [sɪˌlæbəfɪˈkeɪʃən] or /sɪˌlæbəfɪˈkeɪʃən/. Extra stress can be indicated by doubling the symbol: ˈˈ◌.
• Linguists frequently mark primary stress with an acute accent over the vowel, and secondary stress by a grave accent. Example: [sɪlæ̀bəfɪkéɪʃən] or /sɪlæ̀bəfɪkéɪʃən/. That has the advantage of not requiring a decision about syllable boundaries.
• In English dictionaries that show pronunciation by respelling, stress is typically marked with a prime mark placed after the stressed syllable: /si-lab′-ə-fi-kay′-shən/.
• In ad hoc pronunciation guides, stress is often indicated using a combination of bold text and capital letters. For example, si-lab-if-i-KAY-shun or si-LAB-if-i-KAY-shun
• In Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian dictionaries, stress is indicated with marks called znaki udareniya (знаки ударения, ‘stress marks’). Primary stress is indicated with an acute accent (´) on a syllable’s vowel (example: вимовля́ння).^[20][21] Secondary stress may be unmarked or marked with a grave accent: о̀колозе́мный. If the acute accent sign is unavailable for technical reasons, stress can be marked by making the vowel capitalized or italic.^[22] In general texts, stress marks are rare, typically used either when required for disambiguation of homographs (compare в больши́х количествах ‘in great quantities’, and в бо́льших количествах ‘in greater quantities’), or in rare words and names that are likely to be mispronounced. Materials for foreign learners may have stress marks throughout the text.^[20]
• In Dutch, ad hoc indication of stress is usually marked by an acute accent on the vowel (or, in the case of a diphthong or double vowel, the first two vowels) of the stressed syllable. Compare achterúítgang (‘deterioration’) and áchteruitgang (‘rear exit’).
• In Biblical Hebrew, a complex system of cantillation marks is used to mark stress, as well as verse syntax and the melody according to which the verse is chanted in ceremonial Bible reading. In Modern Hebrew, there is no standardized way to mark the stress. Most often, the cantillation mark oleh (part of oleh ve-yored), which looks like a left-pointing arrow above the consonant of the stressed syllable, for example ב֫וקר bóqer (‘morning’) as opposed to בוק֫ר boqér (‘cowboy’). That mark is usually used in books by the Academy of the Hebrew Language and is available on the standard Hebrew keyboard at AltGr-6. In some books, other marks, such as meteg, are used.^[23]

See also[edit]

• Accent (poetry)
• Accent (music)
• Foot (prosody)
• Initial-stress-derived noun
• Pitch accent (intonation)
• Rhythm
• Syllable weight

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• «Feet and Metrical Stress», The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology
• «Word stress in English: Six Basic Rules», Linguapress
• Word Stress Rules: A Guide to Word and Sentence Stress Rules for English Learners and Teachers, based on affixation

When a little stress is a good thing…

How do students of English learn to speak like native speakers? Everyone knows that pronunciation is important, but some people forget about sentence stress and intonation. The cadence and rhythm of a language are important for fluency and clarity. Languages of the world vary greatly in word and sentence stress—many languages stress content words (e.g., most European languages) while others are tonal (e.g., Thai) or have little to no word stress (e.g., Japanese). Practicing sentence stress in English helps students speak more quickly and naturally. Fortunately for teachers, students usually enjoy activities like the one in the worksheet below! After one of our subscribers asked us for resources on sentence stress this week, I thought I’d share some tips and a worksheet that you can use in class.

Sentence stress occurs when we say certain words more loudly and with more emphasis than others. In English, we stress content words because they are essential to the meaning of the sentence. In general, shorter words or words that are clear from the context don’t get stressed.

Content words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Negative words such as not or never also get stressed because they affect the meaning of the sentence. Modals, too, can change the meaning of a sentence. Here is a list of words to stress in an English sentence:

• nouns (people, places, things)
• verbs (actions, states)
• adjectives (words that modify nouns)
• adverbs (words that modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, or entire sentences)
• negative words (not, never, neither, etc.)
• modals (should, could, might, etc., but not will or can)
• yes, no, and auxiliary verbs in short answers (e.g., Yes, she does.)
• quantifiers (some, many, no, all, one, two, three, etc.)
• Wh-Question words (what, where, when, why, how, etc.—note that what is often unstressed when speaking quickly because it’s so common)

Not to Stress

Some words don’t carry a lot of importance in an English sentence. Short words such as articles, prepositions, and conjunctions don’t take stress. Pronouns don’t usually get stressed either because the context often makes it clear who we’re talking about. The Be verb and all auxiliary verbs don’t carry much meaning—only the main verb does. Here is a list of words that shouldn’t be stressed in an English sentence:

• articles (a, an, the)
• prepositions (to, in, at, on, for, from, etc.)
• conjunctions (and, or, so, but, etc.)
• personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, etc.)
• possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her, etc.)
• Be verb (am, is, are, was, were, etc.)
• auxiliary verbs (be, have, do in two-part verbs or questions)
• the modals will and be going to (because they’re common, and the future tense is often clear from context)
• the modal can (because it’s so common)

Examples

Model the following examples for your students and have them repeat after you. The words (or syllables when the word has more than one) that should be stressed are in bold.

• The kids are at the park.
• Do you have any brothers or sisters?
• Why aren’t you doing your homework?
• He bought a red car for his daughter.
• I am Brazilian.
• We are not familiar with this new computer program.
• The athlete ran quickly and won the competition.
• She does not know the answer.
• I don’t know the answer, either.
• We aren’t sure.
• I’ve never heard of that before, but it makes sense.
• They’ll ask the teacher for help.
• Some people prefer Macs, but many others prefer PCs.
• She is going to study tonight.
• I can speak French.
• I can’t speak Japanese.
• Yes, I can. / No, I can’t.

Practice

When practicing sentence stress, whether in the examples above, the worksheet below, or your own activity, encourage reductions such as wanna, gonna, whaddaya, etc. These reductions will make it easier for your students to speak more quickly and will help them recognize when native speakers use these reduced forms. Plus, they’re fun to say!

Sentence Stress – Grammar & Usage Resources

Worksheet Answers

1. boys, playing, video game
2. computer, broken
3. Where, going, after, class
4. doesn’t,like, cake
5. writing, test, long, time
6. prefer, coffee, tea
7. doing, tonight (optional: What /encourage reduced pronunciation of Whaddaya)
8. brother, wants, buy, red, car (demonstrate wanna for the subjects I, you, we, they, and plural count nouns)
9. come, party (encourage reduced pronunciation of gonna)
10. said, has, dog, not, cat

Here’s hoping your students don’t get too stressed!

Tanya

Sentence stress

Sentence stress is the governing stress in connected speech. All words have their individual stress in isolation. When words are connected into sense groups (also called thought groups, i.e., logically connected groups of words), and sense groups are connected into sentences, content words keep their stress, and function words lose their stress. The most important words in the sentence receive stronger stress. The last stressed word in the sentence receives the strongest stress with the help of a fall or a rise.

ANN is READing a NEW BOOK.

WHAT BOOK is she READing?

Does she LIKE the /BOOK?

Note: In this material, capital letters indicate stressed syllables and stressed one-syllable words; the backslash indicates the falling tone; the forward slash indicates the rising tone. Sentence stress is indicated according to the American variant of pronunciation.

Stress in some words or word combinations may be shifted or weakened in a certain way to keep the rhythm of speech. For example: New YORK – NEW York CITy; in the afterNOON – AFternoon SLEEP.

Emphatic stress may be used in the sentence, usually to compare, correct, or clarify things. Emphatic stress singles out the word that the speaker considers the most important, and in this case even a function word may become stressed.

Tina gave the book to ANN.

I said that MAX gave the book to Ann.

HE gave her the book.

Sentence stress is not just a phonetic peculiarity of English. Sentence stress has a very important function of marking the words that are necessary for understanding an utterance. When native speakers of English listen to their conversation partners, they listen for stressed words, because stressed words provide important information. It is often difficult to understand the meaning of the sentence in which even one content word is missing. It is also difficult to understand the sentence in which an important word is not stressed or a function word is stressed.

Unstressed function words make sentences grammatically correct. They are not very important in terms of the information that they provide, and their meaning is usually understandable from their immediate surrounding in a sentence. Even if you don’t get some quickly pronounced function words, the meaning of the whole sentence will be clear to you.

For example, a message from your friend says, «Missed train back Sunday.» You will understand that it means «I missed my train. I will be back on Sunday», right? Only content words are written in the message, but the meaning is clear. In the same way you should listen for stressed content words in speech to understand the meaning of the whole utterance. And you should stress content words in your speech so that other people could understand you.

Sentence stress and rhythm

Sentence stress is the main means of providing rhythm in speech. Rhythm is the key to fluent English speech. Imagine a metronome beating the rhythm. The stressed syllables are like the beats of the metronome: regular, loud, and clear. The unstressed syllables between the beats are shortened, obscured, and joined together.

Look at this sentence:

Kevin sent a letter.

Let’s mark the stressed syllables:

KEVin SENT a LETter.

The pattern of stress in this sentence is stressed – unstressed – stressed – unstressed – stressed – unstressed, with equal number of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Try to pronounce this sentence rhythmically. It should be easy to do because the alternation of one stressed and one unstressed syllable is easy to reproduce. Be sure to make the stress in the stressed syllables strong – much stronger than normal Russian stress.

KEVin SENT a LETter.

Let’s make this sentence a little longer:

Kevin decided to send a letter to his relatives in the village.

Mark the stressed syllables and the fall:

KEVin deCIDed to SEND a LETter to his RELatives in the VILlage.

Now we have one, two, or several unstressed syllables in the intervals between the stressed syllables, but we have the same amount of time for each interval because the stressed syllables, like the beats of the metronome, have to occur regularly. And the sentence is not very long, so we won’t need noticeable pauses between the sense groups.

How do we fit all the unstressed syllables in the intervals between the stressed syllables without breaking the rhythm that we had in «Kevin sent a letter»? The rules of linking and reduction will help us to do it.

Linking and reduction

To preserve speech rhythm, the unstressed vowels in the sentence become shorter and less distinct. Completely unstressed vowels in the unstressed syllables become very short and are often pronounced as the neutral sound. In some cases, the neutral sound may be dropped, for example, can [kən], [kn], BAKery [‘beikəri], [‘beikri]. By the way, the neutral sound [ə] is the most common vowel sound of English, and it deserves your special attention.

The final consonant sound of a word is usually linked to the initial consonant sound of the next word without any pause between them. For easier linking, pronunciation of adjoining consonants may be changed in a certain way. For example, the sounds [s], [z], [θ], [ð], [t], [d] may lose part of their articulation at the juncture (e.g., what’s this; need three); the sounds [t], [d] usually blend into one sound at the juncture (e.g., hot day; need time), or the first [t] or [d] in the pair may be dropped (e.g., just drive; must do it).

The sound [h] in the unstressed words «his, him, her» may disappear to provide smooth linking of adjoining words.

The unstressed syllables become a stream of sounds jammed together. They are lower in pitch and much less distinct than the stressed syllables.

Sentence stress and intonation

Sentence stress is the key component of English intonation. Intonation organizes words into sentences, distinguishes different types of sentences, and adds emotional coloring to utterances. English intonation is quite difficult for Russian students. Developing the ability to hear, understand, and reproduce sentence stress in speech is the main prerequisite to mastering English intonation.

Let’s sum up the functions of sentence stress:

Sentence stress organizes separate words into sentences by making content words stressed and function words unstressed.

Sentence stress makes the utterance understandable to the listener by making the important words in the sentence stressed, clear, and higher in pitch and by shortening and obscuring the unstressed words.

Sentence stress organizes the words in the sentence rhythmically, making the stressed syllables occur at regular intervals and jamming together the unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables.

Sentence stress organizes the words in the sentence into sense groups by joining the unstressed syllables to the main stressed syllable in the group and marking the end of the sense group with a slight pause if necessary.

If necessary, sentence stress singles out the most important word in the sentence by giving it emphatic stress.

Sentence stress marks the end of the sentence by giving the strongest stress to the last stressed syllable with the help of a fall or a rise.

How to study stress and rhythm

It’s not possible, of course, to learn sentence stress and rhythm just by talking about them. Listening and repeating should become an important part of your work on pronunciation. Always try to choose textbooks that have corresponding listening materials – conversations, dialogues, monologues, poems, short stories, etc.

It is necessary to use a lot of additional listening materials to make your pronunciation stable. When you practice repeating sentences after the recorded speaker, mark falling and rising tones, sense groups, pauses, stressed and unstressed words, full and reduced vowels. (See examples in listening materials in the subsection Listening for Intonation in the section Phonetics.)

Beginning students usually find it useful to practice stress and rhythm with the help of those audio materials in which speech is not too fast and sentence stress is very clear, for example, short rhythmical poems, nursery rhymes, children’s songs, folk songs. (Information about poems and songs for children is provided in Nursery Rhymes Foreword and Songs for Children Foreword in the section Kids.)

Modern English songs are also a useful means for learning English stress and rhythm. At the beginning, it is better to practice singing (or saying loudly) the lyrics of those songs in which pronunciation, stress, and rhythm are very clear. (Some advice on how to study English songs can be found in Hobby in the section Hobby.)

You will be surprised how quickly your pronunciation will improve with the help of various audio materials if you practice repeating them regularly, loudly, with the stress, rhythm and intonation that you hear in the audio recordings.

Ударение в предложении и ритм

Ударение в предложении

Ударение в предложении – главное ударение в связной речи. Все слова по отдельности имеют свое индивидуальное ударение. Когда слова соединяются в смысловые группы (называемые sense groups или thought groups, т.е. логически связанные группы слов), а смысловые группы соединяются в предложения, значимые слова сохраняют свое ударение, а служебные слова теряют ударение. Самые важные слова в предложении получают более сильное ударение. Последний ударный слог в предложении получает самое сильное ударение с помощью понижения или повышения.

Анна читает новую книгу.

Какую книгу она читает?

Нравится ли ей эта книга?

Примечание: В этом материале, заглавные буквы указывают ударные слоги и ударные односложные слова; обратный слеш указывает тон понижения; прямой слеш указывает тон повышения. Ударение в предложении указано согласно американскому варианту произношения.

Ударение в некоторых словах или словосочетаниях может смещаться или ослабляться определённым образом, чтобы сохранить ритм речи. Например: New YORK – NEW York CITy; in the afterNOON – AFternoon SLEEP.

Эмфатическое ударение может применяться в предложении, обычно чтобы сравнить, исправить или прояснить что-то. Эмфатическое ударение выделяет слово, которое говорящий считает самым важным, и в этом случае даже служебное слово может стать ударным.

Тина дала книгу Анне.

Я сказал, что МАКС дал книгу Анне.

ОН дал ей книгу.

Ударение в предложении – это не просто фонетическая особенность английского языка. Оно имеет очень важную функцию выделения слов, которые нужны для понимания высказывания. Когда носители английского языка слушают своих собеседников, они ожидают услышать ударные слова, потому что ударные слова дают важную информацию. Часто бывает трудно понять значение предложения, в котором хотя бы одно значимое слово отсутствует. Также трудно понять предложение, в котором важное слово не ударное или служебное слово ударное.

Неударные служебные слова делают предложения грамматически правильными. Они не очень важны в смысле информации, которую они обеспечивают, и их значение обычно понятно по их ближайшему окружению в предложении. Даже если вы не уловите некоторые быстро проговариваемые служебных слов, значение всего предложения будет вам понятно.

Например, в сообщении от вашего друга говорится: «Пропустил поезд назад воскресенье». Вы поймете, что это значит «Я пропустил мой поезд. Я вернусь назад в воскресенье», правильно? Только значимые слова написаны в этом сообщении, но смысл понятен. Таким же образом вы должны вслушиваться в ударные значимые слова в речи, чтобы понять значение всего высказывания. И вы должны делать ударными значимые слова в своей речи, чтобы другие люди могли понять вас.

Ударение в предложении и ритм

Ударение в предложении – это главное средство обеспечения ритма в речи. Ритм это ключ к свободной английской речи. Представьте себе метроном, отбивающий ритм. Ударные слоги как удары метронома: регулярные, громкие и ясные. Неударные слоги между ударами укорачиваются, делаются неотчётливыми и соединяются вместе.

Посмотрите на это предложение:

Кевин послал письмо.

Давайте разметим ударные слоги:

KEVin SENT a LETtеr.

Модель ударения в этом предложении: ударный – неударный – ударный – неударный – ударный – неударный, с равным числом чередующихся ударных и неударных слогов. Постарайтесь сказать это предложение ритмично. Это должно быть легко сделать, т.к. чередование одного ударного и одного безударного слога легко воспроизвести. Обязательно сделайте ударение в ударных слогах сильным – гораздо сильнее, чем нормальное русское ударение.

KEVin SENT a LETtеr.

Сделаем это предложение немного длиннее:

Кевин решил послать письмо своим родственникам в деревне.

Разметьте ударные слоги и понижение:

KEVin deCIDed to SEND a LETtеr to his RELatives in the VILlage.

Теперь у нас один, два или несколько неударных слогов в интервалах между ударными слогами, но мы имеем то же самое количество времени для каждого интервала, потому что ударные слоги, как удары метронома, должны возникать регулярно. А предложение не слишком длинное, поэтому нам не понадобятся заметные паузы между смысловыми группами.

Как нам разместить все неударные слоги в интервалах между ударными слогами без нарушения ритма, который у нас был в «Kevin sent a letter»? Правила соединения и редукции помогут нам сделать это.

Соединение и редукция

Чтобы сохранить речевой ритм, неударные гласные в предложении становятся короче и менее отчётливыми. Полностью безударные гласные в неударных слогах становятся очень короткими и часто произносятся как нейтральный звук. В некоторых случаях нейтральный звук может выпадать, например, can [kən], [kn], BAKery [‘beikəri], [‘beikri]. Кстати, нейтральный звук [ə] – самый распространённый гласный звук английского языка, и он заслуживает вашего особого внимания.

Конечный согласный звук слова обычно соединяется с начальным согласным звуком следующего слова без какой-либо паузы между ними. Для более лёгкого соединения, произношение соседних согласных может изменяться определённым образом. Например, звуки [s], [z], [θ], [ð], [t], [d] могут потерять часть своей артикуляции на стыке (например, what’s this; need three); звуки [t], [d] обычно сливаются в один звук на стыке (например, hot day; need time), или первый [t] или [d] в паре может выпасть (например, just drive; must do it).

Звук [h] в неударных словах «his, him, her» может исчезнуть, чтобы обеспечить гладкое соединение соседних слов.

Неударные слоги становятся потоком звуков, сжатых вместе. Они ниже по тону и гораздо менее отчётливые, чем ударные слоги.

Ударение в предложении и интонация

Ударение в предложении – это ключевой компонент английской интонации. Интонация организует слова в предложения, различает разные типы предложений и добавляет эмоциональную окраску в высказывания. Английская интонация весьма трудна для русских студентов. Развитие способности слышать, понимать и воспроизводить ударение в предложении – главное необходимое условие для освоения английской интонации.

Давайте суммируем функции ударения в предложении:

Ударение в предложении организует отдельные слова в предложения, делая значимые слова ударными, в служебные слова неударными.

Ударение в предложении делает высказывание понятным слушателю, делая важные слова ударными, отчётливыми и выше по тону и укорачивая и делая неотчётливыми неударные слоги.

Ударение в предложении организует слова в предложении ритмически, заставляя ударные слоги возникать через регулярные интервалы и сжимая вместе неударные слоги между ударными слогами.

Ударение в предложении организует слова в смысловые группы путем присоединения неударных слогов к основному ударному слогу в группе и обозначая конец смысловой группы небольшой паузой, если требуется.

Если необходимо, ударение в предложении выделяет наиболее важное слово, давая ему эмфатическое ударение.

Ударение в предложении отмечает конец предложения, делая самое сильное ударение на последнем ударном слоге с помощью понижения или повышения.

Как изучать ударение и ритм

Конечно, невозможно изучить ударение и ритм одними разговорами о них. Прослушивание и повторение должны стать важной частью вашей работы над произношением. Старайтесь всегда выбирать учебники, имеющие сопроводительные материалы для прослушивания – разговоры, диалоги, монологи, стихотворения, короткие рассказы и т.д.

Необходимо использовать много материалов для прослушивания, чтобы сделать ваше произношение стабильным. Когда вы повторяете предложения за диктором на записи, отмечайте тоны понижения и повышения, смысловые группы, паузы, ударные и неударные слова, полные и редуцированные гласные. (См. примеры в материалах для прослушивания в подразделе Listening for Intonation в разделе Phonetics.)

Начинающие студенты обычно находят полезными упражнения по ударению и ритму с помощью тех аудиоматериалов, в которых речь не очень быстрая, а ударения очень отчётливые, например, короткие ритмичные стихотворения, детские стихи, детские песни, народные песни. (Информация о стихах и песнях для детей дана в статьях Nursery Rhymes Foreword и Songs for Children Foreword в разделе Kids.)

Современные английские песни – тоже полезное средство для изучения английского ударения и ритма. Сначала лучше тренироваться петь (или громко проговаривать) слова тех песен, в которых произношение, ударение и ритм очень отчётливые. (Некоторые советы, как изучать английские песни, можно найти в статье Hobby в разделе Hobby.)

Вас удивит, как быстро ваше произношение улучшится с помощью различных аудиоматериалов, если вы будете тренироваться повторять их регулярно, громко, с ударением, ритмом и интонацией, которые вы слышите в аудиозаписях.