Lecture 5. Word Accent

1. Word accent as a component of phonetic structure of a word and its functions.

2. Types of word accents. Linguistically relevant degrees of word stress.

3. Word accentuation theories and basic stress patterns. The main rules of word stress.

4. Utterance stress. Distribution of stress in an utterance. Functions of stress in discourse.

Basic Notions

Word Accent – the greatest degree of special prominence given to one or more syllables as compared with that of the other syllable or syllables in one and the same word.

The accentual structure of words – is constituted by the occurrence of syllables with different degrees of special prominence in different positions in relation to the beginning, middle and end of words.

The tonic stress – the syllable receiving potential primary (nuclea) accent.

The pretonic stress – a secondary accent which is frequently manifested by actual or potential pitch prominence.

The posttonic stress – a secondary accent which may be manifested, when adjecent to tonic, merely by qualitative or quantitative prominence.

Key Problems of the Lecture

Main properties of the word stress

intensity duration frequency formant structure

Types of the word stress

1. dynamic 2. musical 3. Swedish 4. quantitative 5. qualitative

Degrees of the word stress in English

1. Primary (strong) 2. Secondary (partial) 3. Weak (D.Jones, R.Kingdon, V.Vassilyev)

1. Primary 2. Secondary 3. Tertiary 4. Weak (H.A.Gleason, G.Trager, A.Hill)

Accentual Tendencies

1. recessive;

2. retentive;

3. rhythmic;

4. semantic.

Functions of the word stress

1. constitutive 2. distinctive 3. identificatory

Word stress is defined as:

1. (B.A.Bogoroditsky);

2. (D.Jones);

3. (H.Sweet);

4. (A.C.Gimson).

The auditory impression of stress is .

The correlation of degrees of prominence of the syllables in a word forms the stress pattern of the word, which is called the .

Monosyllabic words have no stress patterns.

The placement of stress is conditioned by the context.

Though in general the word stress pattern is conditioned only by objective factors: pronunciation tendencies and the orthoepic norm, it can also be conditioned by ..........................

The distortion of a word stress pattern leads to speech unintelligibility.

The effect of prominence may be produced by a greater degree of loudness, greater length of the stressed syllable, or by some modifications in its pitch and quality.

Their acoustic correlates are: .

On the acoustic level the syllable prominence is manifested in intensity, duration, frequency, formant structure. All these parameters generally interact to produce the effect of prominence.

Depending on which parameter is the leading one, word stress in different languages may be of different types:

1) dynamic stress –

2) musical stress –

3) Swedish word stress is

4) quantitative stress –

5. qualitative stress

English word stress is considered as dynamic, but in fact it is of a complex nature.

It means that stress in English manifests itself in different ways,

In identical positions the intensity of English vowels is different; it is the highest in the vowel //, then the other vowels can be located in such an order according to the decrease of their inherent intensity: /               /, the last one // having the lowest degree of its inherent intensity.

All English vowels may occur in stressed syllables, except

English diphthongs may partially lose their glide quality. Syllables of SC type are never stressed.

The Ukrainian word stress is also regarded as .