Notion of sentence stress. Degrees of sentence stress

Functions of sentence stress

Notion of sentence stress. Degrees of sentence stress

Outline

XIII. Sentence Stress

Questions

1) How can word stress (WS) be defined?

2) What types of WS are distinguished in different languages according to its nature?

3) What functions does WS perform? Explain the essence of each function.

4) How are languages differentiated according to the place of word stress?

5) How many degrees of WS are distinguished by the American linguists?

6) How many types of WS in English according to its DEGREE are singled out by the majority of phoneticians?

7) Comment on the case when the location of WS alone differentiates parts of speech. Give examples.

8) What information should be taken into account in order to decide on stress placement?

It has already been stated that stress is part of the phonetic structure of the word. We always know the place of stress in a word, the potential stress pattern of the word. When the potential stress pattern is actualized in an utterance, stress becomes a feature of the utterance and then one should speak about sentence stress (or utterance stress).

In most books on Phonetic theory sentence stress is treated as an axiom and is not defined. Moreover it is sometimes confused with word stress because the distinction between them is not clear.

D. Jones writes, “... the relative stress of the words in a sentence depends on their relative importance”.

Roger Kingdom gives the following definition: “Sentence stress is the relative degree of force given to various words in a sentence”.

Torsuyev made an attempt to draw a line of demarcation between word stress and sentence stress. Word stress is based on three principles while sentence stress – on four principles: musical, dynamic, qualitative and quantitative. The dynamic principal is more developed than in word stress, since in sentence stress there are 4 degrees of stress: emphatic, primary, subsidiary and unstressing.

According to Torsuyev the qualitative principle is based not only on the fact that words may have no sentence stress, but also on the fact that the quality of the vowel may change, that is when the word receives no sentence stress the vowel is reduced, compare:

many ['meni]

'How many [m@ni] 'pennies are there in a ̀shilling?

Quantitative principle in Torsuyev’s opinion is expressed by the length variations of phonemes.

Gintovt considers sentence stress one of the most important factors of intonation in languages. She analyses sentence stress into three main functional types: syntactic (or normal or sentence stress proper), logical stress and emphatic stress.

Syntactic stress is the most important functional type as its object is to organize the sentence phonetically, to render the meaning clearly, to make speech articulate and to indicate the nucleus of the communicative center which in this case is associated with the last notional word. Syntactic stress emphasizes all the notional elements of speech as they are more important semantically.

Logical stress brings into prominence the most important element in the syntagm (either notional or secondary element).

Emphatic stress brings into prominence the emphatic centre of the syntagm. Both Normal and Logical SS-es may be unemphatic and emphatic.

According to Borisova, sentence stress is the greater prominence with which one or more words in a sentence are pronounced as compared with the other words in a sentence. The special prominence of accented words is achieved through the greater force of utterance and changes in the direction of voice pitch, accompanied by changes in the quantity of the vowels under stress (in unstressed position vowels may undergo qualitative changes).

The subsystem of utterance stress in English includes three basic functional types: nuclear stress (primary accent), non-nuclear full stress (secondary accent) and partial stress.

Degrees of stress in an utterance cor­relate with the pitch range system. Nuclear stress is the strongest — it carries the most important information. Non-nuclear stresses are subdivided into full and partial. Full stress occurs only in the head of an intonation group, partial stress occurs also in the prehead and tail. Partial stresses in the prehead are most frequently of a low va­riety, high partial stress can occur before a low head. Words given partial stress do not lose their prominence completely, they retain the whole quality of a vowel.

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