All words of more than one syllable have

All words of more than one syllable have word stress. This means that one of the syllables is l o n g e r, louder and stronger than the other syllables. These are some main rules about word stress: 1. We can only stress vowels, not consonants. 2. Words that consist of one syllable are normally stressed: VERBS – SELL, BUY NOUNS – CAR, BOOK ADJECTIVES – BIG, SLOW ADVERBS – FAST, HARD NEGATIVE AUXILIARIES – DON’T, CAN’T 3. Words that consist of more than one syllable may have a primary stress (main stress), a secondary stress `after `noon and a weak stress " the syllable or syllables not stressed at all”. `father (unstressed) 4. Stress is always put on the root syllable. `careful `kindness be `loved im `possible 5. In words of French origin the stress always appears on the final syllable. po `lice ma `chine pre `stige bri `gade

A phrase is a combination of words where each word reserves its own meaning. Similar to compound words, a phrase can have its own stress patterns, where one of the word stresses is made stronger than the others within the phrase. This works in phrases like these: 1. Noun phrase (NP): a noun in combination with article, adjective or other modifiers (some, many): a table, the newspaper, an interesting book. 2. Adjective phrase (AP): an adjective by itself (in predicate) or with adverbial modifiers (the boy is good, it is nice, very cold). In a noun phrase, the noun usually has more stress than adjectives or other modifiers. In an adjective phrase, the adjective has more stress than adverbs: an old ‘computer (NP) an excellent ‘weather (NP) It’s very ‘interesting (AP) It’s very interesting old ‘computer (NP) Compound words and phrases have different stress patterns. It influences on meaning in them: A read HEAD –a READ head, a white HOUSE – WHITE house, a black BOARD – a BLACKboard

The syllables of the words marked by sentence-stress are pronounced with greater force, greater length of vowels. The main functions of sentence-stress are to understand fast speech, to give speech melody and rhythm, to differentiate the same sentences and single out the communicative centre of the sentence which introduces new information.

There are three types of sentence-stress: 1. normal (or syntactical) sentence-stress (normal sentence-stress is used to arrange words into sentences or intonation groups phonetically) 2. logical sentence-stress (logically different messages are expressed in a given sentence. Each shifting of the stress modifies the meaning of the sentence - Nelly 'spoke to him yesterday). 3. emphatic sentence-stress (Emphatic stress increases the effort of expression with the High Fall or the Rise-Fall tones. Both normal and logical stresses can be unemphatic or emphatic).

When we speak we can show which words are especially important by given them a lot of stress. Sometimes we use stress to correct what someone says or to make it more exact.