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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 ...
In particular, vowels in unstressed syllables may have a more central (or "neutral") articulation, and those in stressed syllables have a more peripheral articulation. Stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes, the difference is minimal between the acoustic signals of stressed and those of unstressed ...
Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables. Short vowels lengthen in stressed open syllables. On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from /iː i eː e a aː o oː u uː/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/, with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː ...
A stressed syllable is one that is emphasized, or has prominence. In contrast to an unstressed syllable, a stressed syllable has a higher pitch. In musical terms, this pitch is commonly a perfect fourth, perfect fifth, or even minor third, above the voice’s tonic. A stressed syllable tends to have a longer duration and louder volume.
Cardinal vowel chart showing peripheral (white) and central (blue) vowel space, based on the chart in Collins & Mees (2003:227). Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something ...
A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maximum can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern.
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 ...
The unstressed, or thesis, syllables are usually short, and frequently on the words that are lower in the hierarchy. Secondary stresses occur in only a few types of lines, and are usually only on the second part of a compound word. Stress indicators are usually assigned thus: primary stress (/), secondary stress (\), and unstressed (x).