STRESS ON PHRASE AND SENTENCE PHONOLOGY PHRASE STRESS
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STRESS ON PHRASE AND SENTENCE PHONOLOGY
PHRASE STRESS Many short phrases take a distinctive stress pattern in English, determined by the syntactic (grammatical) or semantic relationship of the words in the phrase. In an adjective-noun combination, the adjective usually takes secondary stress while the noun takes primary stress: • It’s a white house. • It’s a black board.
COMPOUND STRESS The previous pattern is in contrast to compund nouns made up of an adjective plus a noun or two nouns: • It’s the White House. • It’s a blackboard.
OTHER COMPOUND WORDS • Black man • Free trade • Hot water • Loudspeaker • Madman • Nobleman • Sweet heart
SENTENCE STRESS Within the English sentence, certain words carry heavier stress than others. For Example: The couple came to the party The words ‘couple’, ‘came’, and ‘party’ are more heavily stressed than the other words because they are the socalled content word (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb). The other words like ‘The’ and ‘to’ are Function words that are commonly unstressed.
CONTRASTIVE AND EMPHATIC STRESS We may wish to stress certain individual words in a sentence in order to change the emphasis. Compare: I’m not a member of the party • I’m not a member of the party.
EXERCISE 1. Write five phrase that is made up of adjective and noun 2. Write five same sentences that have different on single word stress and state what you mean for each stress.
