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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 ...
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 ...
The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. That is one of the three components of prosody , along with rhythm and intonation . It includes phrasal stress (the default emphasis of certain words within phrases or clauses ), and contrastive stress (used to highlight an item, a word or part of a word ...
As long as Latin long vowels ā ē ī ō ū ȳ are indicated, readers will be able to pronounce the word according to the convention of their choice. (Note that both the Latin and Greek alphabets are defective when it comes to vowel length, which determines the location of English stress in these words.)
Primary stress can therefore be determined in cases where the penult is either closed or contains a diphthong. When it contains a vowel that may have been either short or long in Classical Latin, stress is ambiguous. Since Anglo-Latin does not distinguish short from long vowels, stress becomes a lexical property of certain words and affixes.
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 ...
Similarly, a doubled secondary stress mark ˌˌ is commonly used for tertiary (extra-light) stress, though a proposal to officially adopt this was rejected. [86] In a similar vein, the effectively obsolete staveless tone letters were once doubled for an emphatic rising intonation ˶ and an emphatic falling intonation ˵ .
In some analyses, then, the concept of lexical stress may become conflated with that of vowel reduction. An approach that attempts to separate both is provided by Peter Ladefoged, who states that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction.