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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 ...
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 ...
A word may have different pronunciations, depending on its phonetic environment (the neighbouring sounds) or on the degree of stress in a sentence. An example of the latter is the weak and strong forms of certain English function words like some and but (pronounced /sʌm/, /bʌt/ when stressed but /s(ə)m/, /bət/ when unstressed).
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.
It is often implied, [2] incorrectly, that word stress plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. While word stress in most of these languages is much less prominent than in English or German, it is present both in the language and in the meter. Very broadly speaking, syllabic meters in these languages follow the same pattern:
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 ...
The same applies to / ɪər /, / ʊər / and / ɛər /, which are realized as centering diphthongs or long monophthongs in non-rhotic varieties of English, but as vowel+consonant sequences (alternative analysis: centering diphthongs with a rhotacized offset) in rhotic English. The term checked vowel is also useful in the description of English ...