In English,
stress also influences how sentences and incomplete sentences are pronounced.
We say different parts of the sentence with more or less stress, i.e. slower and louder or quicker and more softly.
This is called sentence stress. One
word in the sentence has main stress. This is the word which the speaker thinks
is most important to the meaning of the sentence. Other words can have secondary
stress. This is not so strong as the
main stress and falls on words which are not so important to the meaning as the
word with main stress. Other words in the sentence are unstressed. For example,
in “She came home late last night” or “I can’t understand a word
he says”, the words with the mains stress are the underlined ones, the words
with secondary stress would probably be came,
home, last, night, and can’t,
understand, says, and the unstressed words she and I, a, he.
Main and
secondary stress are usually on content words(verbs, adjectives, nouns, they
give more information) rather than structural words(articles, prepositions,
grammar words)
Changing
the stress of a sentence changes its meaning
Look at these
examples:
The girl ran to
the sea and jumped in quickly (i.e. not another person)
The girl ran to the sea and jumped in
quickly (i.e. not
to any other place)
The girl ran to the sea and jumped in quickly
(i.e. not in
any other way)
Sentence
stress is a characteristic of connected speech, i.e. spoken language in which
all the words join to make a connected stream of sounds
Taken from “The
TKT Course”, Spratt, Pulverness, Williams, Cambridge University Press
The 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
Try saying
the sentences below
1 2 3 4
1 and 2 and 3
and 4
1 and
a 2 and a 3 and a 4
1 and then a 2
and then a 3 and then a 4
The four
sentences take the same length of time to say and you will notice the numbers
are stressed and the unstressed words in between are said much more quickly in
order to keep the rhythm of the language. In other languages, which are not
stress-timed the stress would fall more equally on each word and syllable.”
http://esol.britishcouncil.org/teaching-pronunciation/sentence-stress
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