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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.
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 ...
That is, each syllable has stress or it does not. Many languages have rhythmic stress; location of the stress may not be predictable, but when the location of one stressed syllable (which may be the primary stress) is known, certain syllables before or after can be predicted to also be stressed; these may have secondary stress.
Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis. According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under § Lexical stress above), English normally has prosodic stress on the final stressed syllable in an intonation unit .
Each English word has an associated stress pattern: [1] each syllable is stressed or unstressed. Unstressed syllables are generally lower in pitch, quieter, shorter, and typically also phonetically reduced, notably with the vowels nearer to schwa. Many languages mark syllable stress and its absence with some of these features, but rely on them ...
Bounded vs. unbounded: In a bounded language the main stress appears a fixed distance from the word boundary and the secondary stress appears at fixed intervals from other stressed syllables. In an unbounded language the main stress is drawn to 'heavy' syllables (syllables with long vowels and/or consonants at the end of the syllable). Within ...
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 ...
Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix .) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English ...