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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 ...
Stress in English is phonemic, and some pairs of words are distinguished by stress. For instance, the word contract is stressed on the first syllable (/ ˈ k ɒ n t r æ k t / KON-trakt) when used as a noun, but on the last syllable (/ k ə n ˈ t r æ k t / kən-TRAKT) for most meanings (for example, "reduce in size") when used as a verb.
Secondary stress (or obsolete: secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called primary. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the -nun ...
Stress functions as the means of making a syllable prominent. Stress may be studied in relation to individual words (named "word stress" or lexical stress) or in relation to larger units of speech (traditionally referred to as "sentence stress" but more appropriately named "prosodic stress"). Stressed syllables are made prominent by several ...
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 following is a list of English words without rhymes, called refractory rhymes—that is, a list of words in the English language that rhyme with no other English word. . The word "rhyme" here is used in the strict sense, called a perfect rhyme, that the words are pronounced the same from the vowel of the main stressed syllable onwa
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 ...