Sentence stress and intonation

Sentence stress is the key component of English intonation. Intonation organizes words into sentences, distinguishes different types of sentences, and adds emotional coloring to utterances. English intonation is quite difficult for Russian students. Developing the ability to hear, understand, and reproduce sentence stress in speech is the main prerequisite to mastering English intonation. Let's sum up the functions of sentence stress.

Sentence stress organizes separate words into sentences by making content words stressed and function words unstressed.

Sentence stress makes the utterance understandable to the listener by making the important words in the sentence stressed, clear, and higher in pitch and by shortening and obscuring the unstressed words.

Sentence stress organizes the words in the sentence rhythmically, making the stressed syllables occur at regular intervals and jamming together the unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables.

Sentence stress organizes the words in the sentence into sense groups by joining the unstressed syllables to the main stressed syllable in the group and marking the end of the sense group with a slight pause if necessary.

If necessary, sentence stress singles out the most important word in the sentence by giving it emphatic stress.

Sentence stress marks the end of the sentence by giving the strongest stress to the last stressed syllable with the help of a fall or a rise.

It's not possible, of course, to learn sentence stress and rhythm just by talking about them. Listening and repeating should become an important part of your work on pronunciation. Always try to choose textbooks that have corresponding listening materials. When you practice repeating sentences after the recorded speaker, always mark sentence stress, sense groups, stressed and unstressed words, full and reduced vowels.

Beginning students usually find it useful to practice stress and rhythm working with those audio materials in which speech is not too fast and sentence stress is very clear, for example, children's songs and nursery rhymes, short rhythmical poems, folk songs.

The songs for listening in the section Hobby are also a useful means for learning English stress and rhythm. First listen to the songs in which pronunciation, stress, and rhythm are very clear, for example, Queen - The Show Must Go On or David Coverdale and Whitesnake - Don't Fade Away. Then repeat the lyrics of these songs with the stress and rhythm that you hear in the song. You'll be surprised how quickly your pronunciation will improve with the help of the songs if you practice singing or saying the words loudly together with the singer.

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