OUTLINE

INTRODUCTION
SYLLABLES
STRESS
TYPES OF STRESS
A- WORD STRESS RULES
B- SENTENCE STRESS RULES
C- CONTRASTIVE STRESS RULES
D- EMPHATIC STRESS RULES
CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION
The study of stress is an extremely complex course in linguistics to which we should give
further adequate attention .Therefore our aim here must be strictly focused on the
different definition and type that the stress can have. Generally the stress is usually
examined together with rhyme and intonation for they are all concerned with the
perception of relatives prominence .it is also closely associated with loudness or
amplitude on the one hand and articulatory force on the other but other factors are or can
be involved notably duration and pitch. Pitch seems to be the most important factor
when a stress is final in a phrase (or when is spoken in isolation) the stress is then
associated with or realized by pitch prominence and often with pitch involvement. But
what matters is that the hearer expect sharp contrast of prominence and expect peak of
prominence at particular places in words or phrases. So we can say that stress is relative
degree of force used by a speaker on the various syllables he is uttering, then the relative
prominence of a syllable within the word or of a word within a phrase indicated by
relative stress. As an illustration, the familiar graphic devices between words and
punctuation marks such as comma, colon, semi-colon, and period help us to know how
sentences would sound if spoken , but the correspondence between punctuation pursody
is on partial in the case of word, there fore we are to use prosodic transcription in order to
express the right values.

SYLLABLE
The syllable may be defined as that part of a word can be pronounced at one breath or
pulse. Its usually contain one vowel sound and maybe preceded or followed by one
consonant or more consonant. A word of one syllable is called monosyllabic word, a
word consisting of two syllables is known as disyllable word while a word consisting of
more than two syllables is known as polysyllables word.
Examples;
Monosyllables; dog, rice, go, great
Disyllables; ba/by, tea/chers, stu/dents.
Polysyllables; yes/ ter/ day, o/ ffi/ cial, cap/ ti/ vi/ ty.
While some syllables are said with greater breath effort, other are not. Those syllables
which are uttered with greater energy are said to be stressed while the other part(s) of
the syllable or word which is uttered with less muscular energy is unstressed

DEFINITION OF STRESS
The stress is an extra force used when producing a particular word or syllable.
This means that we consider the prominence usually perceived as greater loudness by the
listener with which one part of the word or longer utterance is distinguished from the
other parts. So we can say, that stress is the relative degree of force used by a speaker on
the various syllables he is uttering.

TYPES OF STRESS
In order to decide on stress placement, it is necessary to make use of some or all the
following information;
1- whether the word is morphologically simple, or whether it is complex as
result either containing one or more affixes (i.e suffixes or prefixes)or of
a compound word.
2- What the grammatical category of the word is (noun, verb, adjectives
e.tc.)
3- The number of syllable(s) the word has
4- The phonological structure of the syllables.
With the above information, we can now proceed by giving the types of stress.

WORD STRESS
As we said previously that the syllable plays the most important roles in a word stress.
When a word is stressed the stress syllable of that word is pronounced more loudly than
the other part(s). in other words, unstressed syllables are produced with less effort
However a word can have one syllable (monosyllable),or with two syllables
(disyllable) or more than two syllables (disyllable).
In a word stress, we notice some rules such as;
iif the final syllable is weak, then the first syllable is stressed.
iiA monosyllable word is usually stressed when pronounced all alone
iiiIf the first syllable of a word is a prefix, then the first syllable is
unstressed while the second is stressed
ivThe first syllable of a disyllabic word is usually stressed.
Apart from the previous rules, we have some other rules; because some words are spelt
exactly like others but have different grammatical functions. Hence, in this case , it is
only the stress that shows the difference between them as can be seen in the following
examples;
NOUNS
CONduct /kndkt/
IMport /Imp:t/

VERBS
conduct /kndkt/
imPORT /Imp:t/

CONvict /knvikt/
conVICT /kn vikt/
We finally have the polysyllabic words which also have their way of
stressing.
1- Words ending in the suffixes -ic, -ion, -ial and ian are stressed
on the second syllable from the end of the words
Examples;
E-co-no-mic /i:knmik/
E-lec-tri-fi-ca-tion /lektrfkein/
Of-fi-cial /f/
Po-li-ti-cian /pltin/
2- Words ending in ty, -ate, -al, -ology and -graphyare stressed
on the third syllable from the end of the words
Examples;
Cap-ti-vi-ty /kp tvt/
De-li-be-rate /dlbret/
E-co-lo-gi-cal /i:kldkl/
Ge-o-lo-gy /dld/
Bi-blio-gra-phy /bblgrf/
3- Words ending in ism ,-ish, -ize and fy often have their primary
stresses on the first syllable
Examples;
Na-tion-al-ism /nnlzm/
Fool-ish /fu:li/
Dra-ma-tize /drmtaz/
Ra-ti-fy /ratfa/

SENTENCE STRESS
A sentence is the combination of different classes of words. Just as the stressing of
individual word help to know which part of it is to uttered with greater force and
loudness, the stressing of sentences also indicates that some words in a sentence are more
important than the others. The most important words are stressed in a sentence while the
less important ones are unstressed. In other words, there are some words which can be
stressed and there are others that cannot be so stressed except for the sake of emphasis.
Depending on their grammatical function in a sentence, English words are
classified into two,viz .the Grammatical words and the content words. The content words
are more important in a sentence and are therefore stressed. These are nouns (e.g girl,
table, furniture); main verbs (talk, see, buy); adjectives (tall, big, expensive,); adverbs
(hurriedly, always, quickly), and negative markers i.e not. On the other hand,
grammatical words are unstressed, and they are as follows;
i)
Personal pronoun, e.g I, me, you, him, it, us, them, he, she, we, they.
ii)
Auxiliary verbs (both primary auxiliary verbs: to be and to have in their
various forms and tenses); and modal auxiliary verbs: shall, should, will,
would, can, could, may, might, ought, need, dare.)

iii)
iv)

Possessive adjectives, e.g my, his, hers, its, our, their e.t.c
Preposition: on, in, at, with, etc. (exceptions are prepositions of more than one
syllable, e.g, aGAINST beFORE etc.)
v)
Conjunctions and correlatives, e.g and, but, or, for, etc.\
vi)
Articles and demonstratives, e.g a, an, the, any, this , that, those, these.
Some examples are as follows:
(a)
The THIEF has been arRESTED
(b)
The WOman KEPT the BOOK in the DRAWER
(c)
THAT is NOT the MAN we SAW YESterday

CONSTRASTIVE STRESS
As said above, grammatical words are usually unstressed. However, any word may be
stressed if a special contrast is intended. In other word, a word which shows the contrast
may be stressed in order to bring out the contrast ( i.e. the point of emphasis) very clearly.
For instance, in a sentence I saw THIS, the stress is on the word THIS indicates that
it was not THAT man whom I saw but THIS man the contrastive stress is also not
separately examined but its knowledge is essential for the understanding of the emphatic
stress. The essence of contrastive stress is to provide one with a means of distinguishing
degrees of emphasis in sentences. Other examples of contrastive stress as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.

I saw the book on the BENCH ( not on the TABLE),

HE gave me the book (not SHE).
He SOLD it to me (he didnt give me FOR FREE).
She bought a WHITE car (not a black one).
EMPHATIC STRESS

As far as emphatic stress is concerned, any word may be stressed to emphasize some
word in order to correct, for example, something already said by someone else. Emphatic
stress is used mainly for the purposes of emphasis. In order to buttress the point stress
above, lets take an example however all the word in a statement may be stressed one
after the other. The sentence we shall consider is as follows. Chenusky lent me his book
yesterday.
1. (i) CHENUSKY lent me his book yesterday (it was CHENUSKY not Rita who
lent me the book.
(ii) Chenusky LENT me his book yesterday (he didnt see it to me).
(iii) Chenusky lent ME his book (he lent the book to ME, not to any other person.

CONCLUSION
It should be clear from what is said above that stress enables us to exert some efforts in
producing sounds and also syllables enable us to identify them. What makes a syllable
prominent? At least four factors are important. Prominence then is produced by four main
factors: loudness, length, pitch and quality. Generally these four factors together in
combination although syllables can sometimes be made prominent by means only one or
two of them. Experimental work has shown that these factors are not equally important;
the strongest effect by pitch and length is also a powerful factor. Loudness and quality
has much less effect.
We can study stress from the point of production perception; the two are obviously
closely related but not identical. The production of stress is generally believed to depend
on the speaker using more muscular energy. From the perceptual point of view, all
stressed syllables have one characteristic in common, and that is prominence.