STRESS WORDS

A major benefit of focusing students on how words are stressed is the extra mental engagement with the word that it gives. A language learner needs to engage with a word many times, preferably in different ways, in order to really learn it - identifying and practising word stress can provide one or two of those engagements.

hy word stress is important

Mistakes in word stress are a common cause of misunderstanding in English. Here are the reasons why:

Stressing the wrong syllable in a word can make the word very difficult to hear and understand; for example, try saying the following words:

oO b'tell
y

Oo hottle

And now in a sentence: "I carried the b'tell to the hottle." Now reverse the stress patterns for the two words and you should be able to make sense of the sentence! "I carried the bottle to the hotel." Stressing a word differently can change the meaning or type of the word: "They will desert* the desert** by tomorrow."

oO Oo desert* desert**
y
Think about the grammatical difference between desert* and desert**. I will look at this in more detail later. Even if the speaker can be understood, mistakes with word stress can make the listener feel irritated, or perhaps even amused, and could prevent good communication from taking place.

These three reasons tell me that word stress is an important part of the English language, and it is something I should help my students with.

What word stress is

When we stress syllables in words, we use a combination of different features. Experiment now with the word 'computer'. Say it out loud. Listen to yourself. The second syllable of the three is stressed. What are you doing so that the listener can hear that stress?

y o o o o o

A stressed syllable combines five features: It is l-o-n-g-e-r - com p-u-ter It is LOUDER - comPUTer It has a change in pitch from the syllables coming before and afterwards. The pitch of a stressed syllable is usually higher. It is said more clearly -The vowel sound is purer. Compare the first and last vowel sounds with the stressed sound. It uses larger facial movements - Look in the mirror when you say the word. Look at your jaw and lips in particular.

It is equally important to remember that the unstressed syllables of a word have the opposite features of a stressed syllable!

Some 'rules' of word stress

There are patterns in word stress in English but, as a rule (!), it is dangerous to say there are fixed rules. Exceptions can usually be found.

Here are some general tendencies for word stress in English:

Word apple table happy

Type of word two-syllable nouns and adjectives

Tendency

Exceptions

stress on the first syllable Oo apple the noun has stress on the first syllable Oo words which "You are suspect can be used the suspect!" import as both the verb has stress insult nouns and on the second verbs syllable oO "I suspect you." fairly equally balanced but with hairbrush compound stronger stress football nouns on the first part Oo hairbrush
How I help my students

hotel lagoon

respect witness

Students can be alarmed when they meet words which are similar but have different stress patterns:

Oo equal

o O oo equality

Ooo equalise

oooOo equalisation

A useful thing you can do is to help students see connections with other word families. Patterns can usually be found, for example:

O o o O oo Ooo oooOo final finality finalise finalisation neutral neutrality neutralise neutralisation
There are some recognised differences in word stress which depend on the variety of English being used, for example:

ooOo Caribbean aluminium (British English)

oOoo Caribbean aluminum (American English)

These differences are noted in good learner dictionaries. If words like these come up in class, point them out to students. Ask if there are similar cases of differences in word stress in their own language - this will heighten awareness and interest.

In the classroom
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Raise awareness & build confidence You can use the same questions with your students that I have used in this article. These will help to raise the students' awareness of word stress and its importance. Some learners love to learn about the 'technical' side of language, while others like to 'feel' or 'see' the language more, hearing the music of word stress or seeing the shapes of the words. Try to use a variety of approaches: helping students to engage with English in different ways will help them in their goal to become more proficient users of the language. Build students' confidence by drawing their attention to the tendencies and patterns in word stress that do exist. Mark the stress Use a clear easy-to-see way of marking stress on the board and on handouts for students. I use the big circle - small circle (O o) method. It is very easy to see and has the added advantage of identifying the number of syllables in the word, as well as the stressed syllable. Students also need to be aware of the way dictionaries usually mark stress - with a mark before the stressed syllable, e.g. 'apple. By knowing this, students will be able to check word stress independently. Cuisenaire rods These different sized, small coloured blocks are great for helping students to 'see' the word stress. The students build the words using different blocks to represent stressed and unstressed syllables. (Children's small building blocks are a good substitute!) Integrate word stress into your lessons You don't need to teach separate lessons on word stress. Instead, you can integrate it into your normal lessons. The ideal time to focus students' attention on it is when introducing vocabulary. Meaning and spelling are usually clarified for students but the sound and stress of the word can all too often be forgotten. Quickly and simply elicit the stress pattern of the word from the students (as you would the meaning) and mark it on the board. Drill it too! Students can use stress patterns as another way to organise and sort their vocabulary. For example, in their vocabulary books they can have a section for nouns with the pattern O o, and then a section for the pattern o O. Three syllable words can be sorted into O o o(Saturday, hospital) and o O o (computer, unhappy). Remember what I noted before: The more times students mentally engage with new vocabulary, the more they are likely to actually learn it. Engaging students through word stress helps to reinforce the learning of the words. Troubleshooting Initially, many students (and teachers!) find it difficult to hear word stress. A useful strategy is to focus on one word putting the stress on its different syllables in turn. For example:

oo0 0o o0o computer ocomputer computer

y
Say the word in the different ways for the students, really exaggerating the stressed syllable and compressing the unstressed ones. Ask the students which version of the word sounds 'the best' or 'the most natural'. By hearing the word stressed incorrectly, students can more easily pick out the correct version.

o o o

A personalised and effective way of getting students to hear the importance of correct word stress is by using people's names as examples. I introduce word stress with my name: "How many parts/syllables are there in my name?" "Which is the strongest - the first or second?" "Is it Emma or Emma?"

Then you can question students about their own names - this will give them a personalised connection to the issue of word stress, with a word they will never forget!

Conclusion
Any work on aspects of pronunciation can take a long time to show improvements and be challenging for both the students and the teacher, but working on word stress can be fun and over time will help your students to be better understood and more confident speakers.

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Rules of Word Stress in English

There are two very simple rules about word stress: 1. One word has only one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. If you hear two stresses, you hear two words. Two stresses cannot be one word. It is true that there can be a "secondary" stress in some words. But a secondary stress is much smaller than the main [primary] stress, and is only used in long words.) 2. We can only stress vowels, not consonants.

Here are some more, rather complicated, rules that can help you understand where to put the stress. But do not rely on them too much, because there are many exceptions. It is better to try to "feel" the music of the language and to add the stress naturally. 1 Stress on first syllable rule Most 2-syllable nouns Most 2-syllable adjectives 2 Stress on last syllable rule example example PRESent, EXport, CHIna, TAble PRESent, SLENder, CLEVer, HAPpy

Most 2-syllable verbs

to preSENT, to exPORT, to deCIDE, to beGIN

There are many two-syllable words in English whose meaning and class change with a change in stress. The word present, for example is a two-syllable word. If we stress the first syllable, it is a noun (gift) or an adjective (opposite of absent). But if we stress the second syllable, it becomes a verb (to offer). More examples: the words export, import, contractand object can all be nouns or verbs depending on whether the stress is on the first or second syllable. 3 Stress on penultimate syllable (penultimate = second from end) rule Words ending in -ic Words ending in -sion and -tion example GRAPHic, geoGRAPHic, geoLOGic teleVIsion, reveLAtion

For a few 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. 4 Stress on ante-penultimate syllable (ante-penultimate = third from end) rule Words ending in -cy, -ty, -phy and gy Words ending in -al example deMOcracy, dependaBIlity, phoTOgraphy, geOLogy CRItical, geoLOGical

5 Compound words (words with two parts) rule For compound nouns, the stress is on the first part For compound adjectives, the stress is on the second part For compound verbs, the stress is on the second part
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example BLACKbird, GREENhouse bad-TEMpered, oldFASHioned to underSTAND, to overFLOW

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.
Contents
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1 Phonetic realization 2 Placement, rhythm, and metrical feet 3 Stress and vowel reduction 4 Historical effects of stress 5 Timing 6 Notation 7 See also 8 Notes 9 External links

[edit]Phonetic

realization

The ways stress manifests itself in the speech stream are highly language-dependent. In some languages, stressed syllables have a higher or lower pitch than non-stressed syllables so-called pitch accent (or musical accent). In other languages, they may bear either higher or lower pitch than surrounding syllables (a pitch excursion), depending on the sentence type. There are also dynamic accent (loudness), qualitative accent (Place or manner of articulation, e.g. reduction), and quantitative accent (length, known in music theory as agogic accent). Stress may be characterized by more than one of these characteristics. Further, stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes the difference between the acoustic signals of stressed and unstressed syllables may be minimal. In English, stress is most dramatically realized on focussed or accented words. For instance, consider the dialogue "Is it brunch tomorrow?" "No, it's dinner tomorrow." In it, the stress-related acoustic differences between the syllables of "tomorrow" would be small compared to the differences between the syllables of "dinner", the emphasized word. In these emphasized words, stressed syllables such as "din" in "dinner" are louder and longer.
[1][2][3]

They may also have a different fundamental

frequency, or other properties. Unstressed syllables typically have a vowel which is closer to a neutral position (the schwa), while stressed vowels are more fully realized. In contrast, stressed and unstressed vowels in Spanish share the same qualityunlike English, the language has no reduced vowels. (Much literature emphasizes the importance of pitch changes and pitch motions on stressed syllables, but experimental support for this idea is weak. Nevertheless, most experiments do not directly address the pitch of

speech, which is a subjective perceived quantity. Experiments typically measure the speech fundamental frequency, which is objectively measurable, and strongly correlated with pitch, but not quite the same thing.) Stress can also be put on any word in a sentence to make a possible several sentences: I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.) I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.) I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.) I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took a different one.) I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took something else.) I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took it some other day.) The possibilities for stress in tone languages is an area of ongoing research, but stress-like patterns have been observed in Mandarin Chinese.[4] They are realized as alternations between syllables where the tones are carefully realised with a relatively large swing in fundamental frequency, and syllables where they are realized "sloppily" with typically a small swing. Stressed syllables are often perceived as being more forceful than non-stressed syllables. Research has shown, however, that although dynamic stress is accompanied by greater respiratory force, it does not mean a more forceful articulation in the vocal tract. [edit]Placement,

rhythm, and metrical feet

 

quantity-sensitivity rhythm  trochaic (quantity-sensitive: 'LL, 'H; quantity-insensitive: '  iambic (L'L, L'H, 'H) )

  

demarcative function (fixed word edge) culminativity (lexical words have single stress) binary vs ternary

Some languages have fixed stress. The stress is placed always on a given syllable, as in Czech, Finnish and Hungarian (stress always on the first syllable) or Quechua and Polish (stress always on the penult: one syllable before the last) or on third syllable counting backwards (the antepenult), as in Macedonian (see: Stress in Macedonian language). Other languages have stress placed on different syllables but in a predictable way, as in Classical Arabic and Latin (where stress is conditioned by the structure of the penultimate syllable). They are said to have a regular stress rule. French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable. In fact, however, it may be said that French has no word stress at all; instead, stress is placed on the final syllable (or, if the final is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable) of a string of words. This string may be equivalent to a clause or a phrase. When a word is said alone, its last syllable is also the end of the phrase, so the stress is placed there.

There are also languages like English, Italian, Russian and Spanish, where stress is (at least partly) unpredictable. Rather, it is lexical: it comes as part of the word and must be memorized, althoughorthography can make stress unambiguous for a reader, as is the case in Spanish and Portuguese. In such languages, otherwise homophonous words may differ only by the position of the stress (e.g.incite and insight in English), and therefore it is possible to use stress as a grammatical device. English does this to some extent with noun-verb pairs such as a rcord vs. to recrd, where the verb is stressed on the last syllable and the related noun is stressed on the first; record also hyphenatesdifferently: a rcord vs. to re-crd. The German language does this with certain prefixes for example m-schrei-ben (to rewrite) vs. um-schri-ben (to paraphrase, outline) and in Russian this phenomenon often occurs with different cases of certain nouns ( /zemli (genitive case of the Earth, land or soil) and (soils or lands plural form)).

It is common for dialects to differ in their stress placement for some words. For example, in British English, the word "laboratory" is pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable, whileAmerican English stresses the first. Some speakers make quite complex semantic distinctions in English using secondary stress. For instance, between "paper BAG" as in a bag made of paper, and "PAPer bag" as in a bag for carrying newspapers. Main article: Secondary stress 'Primary' and 'secondary' stress are distinguished in some languages. English is commonly believed to have two levels of stress, as in the words cunterfil [ ka nt r f l] and cunterintlligence[ ka nt r. n t l d ns], and in some treatments has even been described as having four levels, primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary, but these treatments often disagree with each other. It is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables may occur without vowel reduction. [edit]Stress

and vowel reduction

In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, many unstressed vowels reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect. Other languages, such as Finnish, have no unstressed vowel reduction. [edit]Historical

effects of stress

It is common for stressed and unstressed syllables to behave differently as a language evolves. For example, in the Romance languages, the original Latin short vowels /e/ and /o/ have generally become diphthongs when stressed. Since stress takes part in verb conjugation, this has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages. For example, the Spanish verb volver has the form volv in the past tense but vuelvo in the present tense (see Spanish irregular verbs). Italian shows the same phenomenon but with /o/ alternating with /uo/ instead. This behaviour is not confined to verbs; for example, Spanish viento "wind", from Latin ventum.

[edit]Timing Further information: Timing (linguistics) English is a stress-timed language; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and nonstressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. Other languages have syllable timing(e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), where syllables or moras are spoken at a roughly constant rate regardless of stress.

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