The stress pattern of English words The nature

The stress pattern of English words. The nature of English words stress. The functions of word stress.

The nature of English words stress. A word, as a meaningful language unit, has a definite phonetic structure. The phonetic structure of a word comprises not only the sounds that the word is composed of and not only the syllabic structure that these sounds form, it also has a definite stress pattern.

The nature of English words stress. There may be one prominent syllable in a word as compared to the rest of the syllables of the same word (as in "important"), there may be two equally prominent syllables (as in "misbehave"), two unequally prominent syllables (as in "e, xami’nation") or more prominent syllables (as in ' unre, lia’bility").

The nature of English words stress • And this correlation of degrees of prominence of the syllables in a word forms the stress pattern of the word, which is often called the accentual structure of a word. Monosyllabic words have no stress pattern, because there can be established no correlation of prominence within it. Yet as lexical units monosyllables are regarded as stressed

The nature of English words stress The stress patterns of words are generally perceived without difficulty. Actual speech does not consist of isolated words. And the stress pattern of a word is deduced from how the word is accented in connected speech.

The nature of English words stress On the other hand, the stress pattern of a word is only its potential pattern in an utterance. Though English words generally retain their stress patterns in connected speech, there occur numerous instances when the stress pattern, of a word is altered

The nature of English words stress Cf. 'un happy - He was so unˋhappy. He remembered those ˋunhappy days. Thus, word stress may be said to be a word—level concept, which should not be confused with utterance stress. Word stress be tangs to the word when said in isolation. Whereas utterance stress belongs to the utterance.

The nature of English words stress The placement of utterance stress is primarily conditioned by the situational and linguistic context. It is also conditioned by subjective factors: by the speaker's intention to bring out words which are considered by him to be semantically important in the situational context.

The nature of English words stress • As for the stress pattern of a word, it is conditioned only by objective factors: pronunciation tendencies and the orthoepic norm.

The nature of English words stress In different languages stress may be achieved by various combinations of these parameters. Depending upon which parameter is the principal one in producing the effect of stress, word stress in languages may be of different types.

Different types of word stress There are languages with dynamic word stress. Stress in such languages is mainly achieved by a greater force of articulation which results in greater loudness, on the auditory level, and greater intensity on the acoustic level. The stressed syllables are louder than the unstressed ones. In languages with musical word stress prominence is mainly achieved by variations in pitch level, the main acoustic parameter being fundamental frequency. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese are languages with musical word stress (or tonic word stress).

Different types of word stress In languages with quantitative word stress the effect of stress is mainly based on the quantity of the sound, i. e. its duration. In such languages vowels in the stressed syllables are always longer than vowels in unstressed syllables.

THE FUNCTIONS OF WORD STRESS. Word stress has a constitutive function, as it moulds syllables into a word by forming its stress pattern. Without a definite stress pattern a word ceases to be a word and becomes a sequence of syllables. Word stress has a distinctive function in English, because there exist different words in English with analogous sound structure which are differentiated in speech only by their stress patterns

THE FUNCTIONS OF WORD STRESS. Noun Adjective 'ac cent or ‘accent Verb 'insult 'ab stract ac’cent or acʹcent in’sult , ab’stract or ab’stract

Is it the different degrees of stress or rather the stress patterns that distinguish one word from another? There exist different views of the problem. Some linguists (G. Trager, A. Hill) regard degrees of word stress as phonological units, which can distinguish words. They consider degrees of word stress to be separate phonemes.

Alongside the generally accepted phonemes they have introduced into the phonemic' inventory 4 stress phonemes: primary (or loud), secondary (or reduced loud), tertiary {or medial) and weak stress phonemes.

Another view is expressed by G. Torsuyev, H. Kurath, A. Gimson and others. They think that it is the stress patterns of words that contrast with each other rather than degrees of stress. Moreover, in one stress pattern secondary stress may be stronger than primary stress in another stress pattern.

Questions 1) What types of word stress do you know? 2) What functions of word stress?