Stress

Stress in simple
words
I. The nature of stress
 Stress is an extra force put on a particular
syllable in a word in speech.
 A stressed syllable is said with more energy
and stands out in a word.
 Father /'f¿:T±/
 Society /s±'sai±ti/
 Individual /,indi'vidZU±l/
 Investigation /in,vesti'geiSn/
 Individuality / ,indi,vidZU'æl±ti/
 We can study stress from the point of view
of production and of perception.
 The production of stress is generally
believed to depend on the speaker using
more muscular energy than is used on
unstressed syllables.
 From the perceptual point of view, all
stressed syllables have one characteristic in
common – prominence
 Four factors are important in making a
syllable prominent
 Loudness: Most people seem to feel that
stressed syllables are louder than unstressed
 Length: The length of syllables plays an
important part in prominence.
 Pitch: Stressed syllables are said in high
pitch.
 Quality: A syllable will tend to be
prominent if it contains a vowel that is
different in quality from neighbouring
vowels.
 Levels of stress
 Primary stress
 Secondary stress
 Unstressed syllables
 in·di·vis·ible /,indi'viz±bl /
 con·duct·iv·ity /,kÎndÝk'tiviti /
 Dis·in·fla·tion /,disin'fleiSn /
 pho·to·genic /,f±Ut±U'dZenik /
 un·be·liev·able /,Ýnbi'li:v±bl/
 Placement of stress
within the word
In order to decide on stress placement, it is
necessary to make use of some or all of the
following information:
 The morphological structure of the word
 The grammatical category of the word
 The number of syllables of the word
 The phonological structure of the syllables of
the word
 Strong and weak syllables
 When we compare weak syllables with strong
syllsbles, we find the vowel in a weak syllable
tends to be shorter, of lower intensity and
different in quality.
 The different types of weak syllables include:
i. the vowel  (“schwa”)
ii. a close front unrounded vowel in the general area
of  and  (symbolised )
iii. a close back rounded vowel in the general area of
and  (symbolised )