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The schwa / ə / is usually considered neither free nor checked because it cannot stand in stressed syllables. In non-rhotic dialects, non-prevocalic instances of / ɜːr / as in purr, burr and / ər / as in lett er , bann er pattern as vowels, with the former often being the long counterpart of the latter and little to no difference in quality ...
As in modern English, there was a distinction in Old English between stressed and unstressed syllables. Stress typically could be found only on the first or leftmost syllable of a root morpheme. In morphologically simple words, this is equivalent to the first syllable of the word: e.g. yfel 'evil', [158] pronounced [ˈyvel]. Non-initial ...
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 is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long ...
Stressed antepenultimate syllables are always written with that accent mark, as in árabe. If the last syllable is stressed, the accent mark is used if the word ends in the letters n, s, or a vowel, as in está. If the penultimate syllable is stressed, the accent is used if the word ends in any other letter, as in cárcel.
Note that in both cases, the pitch accent remains linked to the stressed syllable and the edge tone remains at the end of the phrase. Just as the same contour can apply to different phrases (e.g. (1) and (2)), different contours can apply to the same phrase, as in (2) and (3). In (3) the H* pitch accent is replaced with an L* pitch accent. (1) (2)
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.
In English poetry, accent refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress.