Summary. Stressis the degree offer of force used in producing a syllable

Stress is the degree offer of force used in producing a syllable. Stressed syllables are more prominent than unstressed ones. The prominence is usually due to an increase in loudness of the stressed syllable but increase in length and often pitch may contribute to the overall impression of prominence. Wbrd stress is a stress pattern of a word. Accent is a means of making a word or a syllable stand out in a stream of speech, associated mainly with pitch change, and is therefore synonymous to sentence stress. The phonetic means of sentence stress are the same as of word stress: loudness, pitch and duration, especially pitch. Thus the term stress is more often used to refer to all sorts of prominence, while accent is more often associated with pitch. The domain of word stress is a word, the domain of accent is the whole utterance.

The acoustic correlates of the prosodic features of length, loudness and pitch are duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. On the articulatory level greater loudness is achieved by subglottal muscular adjustment which will create an acoustic effect of increased amplitude. Laryngeal muscular adjustment will create increased tension in the vocal folds which will result in increased fundamental frequency, i.e. pitch. However, the auditory sensation of loudness will increase here as well. Thus there is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a certain articulatory gesture and an auditory effect. Experimental data show that pitch and length are particularly important cues for stress perception in English, whereas vowel length and vowel quality are decisive for the Russian language. The overall impression of greater stress in English is due to a greater contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in pitch and duration.

It is the presence of secondary stress that distinguishes the rhythm of an English polysyllabic word from a Russian word of the same length. In Russian there is only one word stress in a word, it is called culminative as the whole word is centered around it. The main functions of Russian word stress are the same as they are in English: constitutive and word-identifying. The differentiating and delimitative functions of word stress are secondary for Russian, although the free placement of stress does result in the exist­ence of accentual minimal pairs: 'мука - му'ка. In languages with a fixed stress the delimitative (demarcative) function comes first: word stress sig­nals either the beginning or the end of words. In English and in Russian word stress is free and variable.

In order to decide on stress placement in English it is necessary to make use of the following factors:

• whether the word is morphologically simple, complex or compound;

• the grammatical category to which the word belongs (noun, verb, adjective etc.);

• the number of syllables in the word;

• the phonological structure of syllables (syllable weight).

Thus the main factors are morphological and rhythmical. Stress models with a secondary stress are especially productive. The recent finding of the second half of the 20^th century is that no two primary stresses may occur in a word.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11