Sentence Stress

What is Stress:

When
producing the word banana ,one can identify three identifiable
syllables.The second syllable in this word sounds louder than the other
syllables,so one gets ba'nana.This stressed syllable also has a change
in the pitch or the level of the speaker's voice,and the vowel sound in
that syllable is lengthened.Thus for stressed syllables three features
are identified : loudness , pitch and length



2) What is Unstress :

In
order for one syllable to be perceived as stressed ,the syllable around
it need to be unstressed.In the word syllabus for instance the first
syllable is stressed ,this implies that the finale two syllables are
unstressed .one my know that the most commonly occurring vowel sound in
English known as "schwa" never appears within a stressed syllable.schwa
is by nature an unstressed syllable.If one tries to stress any syllable
which contains schwa,he will change its properties producing another
phoneme.



3) The importance of sentence stress :

Any
one who has listened to any native speaker of English will be aware
that some words are given more prominence than others in the same
sentence.For example "Her brother bought her a new coat for Christmas"
in this sentence a native speaker would
stress:brother,bought,new,coat,Christmas.one would not stress :
her,a,for.In this way ,it is possible to divide the sentence into strong
syllables ans weak syllables.This distinction is important since native
speakers swallows the weak syllables.



Content words and form words :

consider
the following sentence : " The student wants a drink of water".If this
water had to be obtained by telegram,and if one had to pay for each word
,he would be unwilling to send the whole of this message and would
probably send "Student wants drink water".These four words convey the
whole message of the sentence and are for this reason known as Content words or Lexical words.These
content words are always stressed and they include
:NOUNS,VERBS,ADJECTIVES,and ADVERBS.The other words in the sentence
exist for grammatical convention ,and do not change or add to the
meaning of the sentence.These are called Form words or Grammatical words.They
exist to satisfy the grammatical form of the sentence.They comprise
:ARTICLES ,PREPOSITIONS,POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES ,PERSONAL
PRONOUNS,AUXILIARIES ,CONJUNCTIONS , and RELATIVES PRONOUNS.All form
words are usually unstressed but there are exceptions,some form words
tend to be stressed as :The demonstrative pronouns,possessive
pronouns,interrogative pronouns,post position (after the
word),interjections.Since "not" maybe considered as a kind of adverbs or
pronouns as:nobody,no one,nothing,....are always stressed