Word stress

Word stress (word accent) is greater prominence given to one or more syllables in a word.

Stressed and unstressed syllables differ in quantity (length) and quality. They are longer when stressed and carry vowels of full formation. When unstressed, they undergo reduction and become shorter.

Word stress should be considered from the point of view of:

1. its place in a sentence;

2. its degree.

There are two degrees of word stress in English:

1. primary or strong (marked above the syllable);

2. secondary or weak (marked under the syllable).

The place of word stress depends on the quantity of syllables in a word.

Accented types of words

1. Monosyllabic, disyllabic and trisyllabic words are stressed on the first syllable, e. g. phoneme, palate, prefix, and colony.

Note 1. In three-syllable words the stressed vowel is mostly read according to the second type of the syllable, e. g. family.

Note 2. In words with inseparable prefixes the stress falls on the syllable next to the prefix: begin, prepare.

2. Most four-syllable words have the stress laid on the third syllable from the end, e. g. political, experiment, historical, geology.

3. Compound nouns are stressed on the first component, the second though unstressed has a vowel of full formation, e. g. blackboad.

Exceptions: arm-chair, ice-cream, tape-recorder.

4. Polysyllabic words have the primary stress on the third syllable from the end and the secondary stress on the second pretonic syllable, e. g. university, assimilation, possibility.

5. The following groups of words have two primary stresses:

   • numerals (from 13 to 19);

   • compound adjectives: well-known, good-looking;

   • composite verbs: get up, sit down, put on;

   • wordswithseparableprefixes:

     1. implying negation: un-, in-, il-, ir-, non-, dis-, e. g. unknown, inaccurate, irregular, non-aggressive, disbelief, illiterate;

     2. prefixes implying assistance: sub-, vice-, e.g. subtitle, vice-minister;

     3. prefixes with different meanings: mis- - meaning ‘wrong’ (misunderstand); over- - meaning ‘too much’ (overtired); pre- - meaning ‘before’ (pre-revolutionary); inter- - meaning ‘among’, ‘between’ (international); anti- - meaning ‘against’ (antiwar).

Note. Words listed under group 5 undergo variations in stress. In utterances they lose one stress or the other. When they are used attributively, the second stress is lost; when used predicatively, the first stress is lost:

AttributivelyPredicatively

Fourteen years. He’s fourteen.

A hard-working boy. The boy is hard-working.

A well-planned house. The house is well-planned.

A well-bred man.The man is well-bred.

Intonation

Intonation (prosody)– a complex unity of speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm and voice timbre, which enables the speaker to convey his thoughts, emotions and attitudes about the utterance he perceives or produces or about the hearer.

The intonation group (syntagm, sense-group, intonation group, tone-group, tune, tone-unit, intonation contour)–

1. a linguistic unit hierarchically higher than the rhythmic unit;

2. the phonetic unity, which conveys a semantic entity in thinking or speaking, consisting of one or several rhythmic groups.

The rhythmic group (accentual unit, rhythmic unit) – either one stressed syllable or a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it.

Clitics – the stressed syllables in the rhythmic unit.

Enclitics – the unstressed syllable(s) that follow the stressed syllables or the nucleus of the rhythmic unit.

Proclitics – the unstressed syllable(s) that precede the stressed syllables or the nucleus of the rhythmic unit.