word and sentence stress

English is a stress-timed languageThe English language is often referred to as

stress-timed. This means that stress in a spoken sentence occurs at regular intervals and the

length it takes to say something depends on the number of stressed syllables rather than the

number of syllables itself.

Most sentences have two types of word: content words function words Content words are the key words of a sentence.

They are the important words that carry the meaning or sense. They are usually stressed.

Function words are articles, prepositions, etc. They are usually unstressed.

Stress: relative degree of loudness among syllables. There are 3 main levels of stress: primary /´/, secondary /^/, and weak // or unmarked. Stress is phonemic because a change here may change the meaning of a word/sentence.

The boys didn't have time to finish their homework before the lesson began. Read the sentence the first time pronouncing each word carefully. Read the sentence a second time in natural speech.

The time between stressed words is always the same.

How can sentence and word stress help you when persuading?

Written by Lynn Gallacher, British Council, Spain

Stress on penultimate syllable Words ending in –ic: GRAPHic, geoGRAPHic,

geoLOGic Words ending in -sion and –tion: teleVIsion,

reveLAtion There are some words native English speakers

don't always "agree" on where to put the stress. For example, some people say teleVIsion and others say TELevision. Another example is: CONtroversy and conTROversy.

Words ending in -cy, -ty, -phy and –gy: deMOcracy, dependaBIlity, phoTOgraphy,

Words ending in –al: CRItical, geoLOGical

Compound words (words with two parts)

For compound nouns, the stress is on the first part: BLACKbird, GREENhouse

For compound adjectives, the stress is on the second part: bad-TEMpered, old-FASHioned

For compound verbs, the stress is on the second part: to underSTAND, to overFLOW

Pitch: musical tone, or frequency of vibration of the sound waves, the greater the frequency, the higher the pitch. Pitch depends on the nature of the vocal cords. Men will have a lower quality of pitch than women, and children normally have a higher pitch in English.

“When sentence-stress falls on a word of more than one syllable, it usually falls on the syllable that normally receives word-stress.” (MAEP)

I’ll méet you tomórrow.