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Prosodic stress, or sentence stress, refers to stress patterns that apply at a higher level than the individual word – namely within a prosodic unit. It may involve a certain natural stress pattern characteristic of a given language, but may also involve the placing of emphasis on particular words because of their relative importance ...
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 ...
By not treating stress as a feature of an individual segment, metrical phonology avoids the inexplicable differences between the stress feature and other phonological features. [2] Metrical phonology also correctly predicts the ambiguity between broad and narrow focus. [13] There are two possible metrical patterns for two-word phrases: S-W and W-S.
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 ...
They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters.
One systematic case appears in the stress pattern of some deverbal nouns. Many of these words have the same origin, and similar meanings, and are essentially the same word. True heteronyms require the two words to be completely unrelated, which is a rare occurrence. For a longer list, see wikt:Category:English heteronyms.
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Such patterns are most notable between an individually-uttered word and the same word in a larger phrase. Consider, for example, the word house, which has no internal stress pattern, alone. However, within a phrase like the white house (e.g. /ðə ʍàɪt hâʊs/) versus the White House (e.g. /ðə ʍáɪt hàʊs/), the stress on the word house ...