Comparing English and Russian. Word accentual instability

Word accentual instability

Compounds

Secondary stress

Prefixes

Suffixes

Roots

English word stress location

Functions of word stress

Topology of word stress

Degrees of word stress

Perceptual and acoustic correlates

WORD STRESS

LECTURE 4

4.1. Definition: stress and accent

4.1. Definition: stress and accent

Not all syllables of a disyllabic or a polysyllabic word are equally prominent: one is more prominent, or salient, than the other(s). A property of syllables which makes them stand out as more noticeable than the others is called stress. Word stress is the stress pattern of a word. Not all the languages make use of the possibility of using stress on different syllables of a polysyllabic word: in English, however, the stress patterns is an essential component of a word's phonological form, and learners of English either have to learn each word's stress pattern, or to learn rules to guide them in how to assign stress correctly.

Another term used in phonetic literature to refer to nearly the same notion is accent. It can be defined as the placement of pitch prominence, i.e. higher or lower pitch than the surroundings, on a syllable. For example, in the v/ordpo'TAto, the middle syllable is the most prominent; if you say the word on its own, you will probably produce a fall in pitch on the middle syllable, making that syllable accented.

In this sense stress is a more general term than accent. The term stress is more often used to refer to all sorts of prominence, while accent is associated with pitch prominence.

The word accent is also widely used as a synonym of sentence stress to refer to a greater prominence given to a syllable or a word of a particular sentence. We should be clear that, in any given sentence of more than one syllable, there is no logical necessity for there to be just one syllable that stands out from all the others. Much writing on this subject has used short, invented sentences designed to have just one obvious sentence stress, but in real life we often find exceptions to this. In a sentence of five or six words, we tend to break a string of words into separate tone units, each of which will be likely to have a strong stress. For example:

If she hadn't been ^r rich | she couldn't have ^bought it.

It is widely believed that the most likely place for sentence stress to fall is on the appropriate syllable of the last lexical word of the sentence. In this case, "appropriate syllable" refers to syllable indicated by the rales of word stress, while "lexical word" refers to words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. This rule accounts for the stress patterns of many sentences (80%), but there is considerable controversy over how to account for the many exceptions: some linguists say that sentence stress tends to be placed on the word which is most important to the meaning of the sentence, while others say that the placement of the stress is determined by the underlying syntactic structure.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11