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Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
Word stress, or sometimes lexical stress, is the stress placed on a given syllable in a word. The position of word stress in a word may depend on certain general rules applicable in the language or dialect in question, but in other languages, it must be learned for each word, as it is largely unpredictable, for example in English.
The structure of the metrical grid explains a number of otherwise surprising features of prominence patterns in language. For example, the main stress in English phrases may be placed several syllables away from the end of the phrase, even though the rule assigning this stress looks for a lexically stressed syllable near this boundary. [9]
An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
The rhythm of the English language has four different elements: stress, time, pause, and pitch. Furthermore, "When stress is the basis of the metric pattern, we have poetry; when pitch is the pattern basis, we have rhythmic prose" (Weeks 11). Stress retraction is a popular example of phrasal prosody in everyday life. For example:
[1] It is often implied, [2] incorrectly, that word stress plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. While word stress in most of these languages is much less prominent than in English or German, it is present both in the language and in the meter. Very broadly speaking, syllabic meters in these languages follow the same pattern:
The feminine rhyme is rare in a monosyllabic language such as English, but the gerund and participle suffix-ing, which adds an additional stressless syllable, can make it readily available. For instance, the -ing ending makes available three of the feminine rhymes in Shakespeare's sonnet above, rolling , trolling , and doting .
The same applies to / ɪər /, / ʊər / and / ɛər /, which are realized as centering diphthongs or long monophthongs in non-rhotic varieties of English, but as vowel+consonant sequences (alternative analysis: centering diphthongs with a rhotacized offset) in rhotic English. The term checked vowel is also useful in the description of English ...