sentence stress
Noun: The pattern of emphasis placed on certain syllables or words within a spoken sentence. It involves making specific words sound stronger, louder, or longer than others to convey meaning, structure, and intent.
Sentence stress is a core component of English pronunciation and intonation. It is used to highlight the most important words (typically content words like nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and de-emphasize less important words (typically function words like articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs). This rhythm helps listeners understand the key information and the speaker's attitude.
- In the sentence "I LOVE that MOVIE," the stress on "love" and "movie" highlights the key content.
- Changing the stress can change the meaning: "SHE gave him the book" (not someone else) versus "She gave HIM the book" (not to another person).
- The sentence "He can COME if he WANTS" uses stress on the main verbs to convey the conditional meaning clearly.
- Contrastive Stress: Used to correct, contradict, or contrast information.
- "I said TWELVE, not twenty."
- Emphatic Stress: Used to express strong emotion or emphasis.
- "That was an AMAZING performance!"
- Tonic Stress: The primary stress in a tone unit, often falling on the last content word.
- "She's studying BIOLOGY."
- Word Stress (Noun): The emphasis on a particular syllable within a single word (e.g., RE-cord vs. re-CORD). This is a different, though related, phonological concept.
- Intonation (Noun): The rise and fall of the voice in speech, which works together with sentence stress to convey meaning.
- Prominence (Noun): In phonetics, a more technical term for the auditory salience of a syllable.
- Phrasal stress
- Prosodic emphasis
The term "sentence stress" has a specific, technical meaning in linguistics and language teaching. It should not be confused with: 1. Grammatical stress: This typically refers to word stress. 2. Emotional stress (worry): This is a completely different concept related to anxiety or pressure. 3. A judicial sentence: This is a homograph (same spelling, different meaning) with no relation to pronunciation.
-
the distribution of stresses within a sentence
