28. Sentence stress in English

 

In Linguistics, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or sentence.

Sentence stress in English is the way a speaker highlights certain words in a sentence. It helps the listener focus on important parts and understand the speaker’s meaning. If stress is not used or used incorrectly, listener can misinterpret the intended meaning.

Ex:-  “Is it brunch tomorrow.”

         “No, it’s dinner tomorrow.”

In it the stress syllable is ‘din’ in dinner which is louder and longer.

Ex:-  “I didn’t take the test yesterday.”(somebody else did)

         “I didn’t take the test yesterday.”(I did not take it)

You can’t choose where to put stress in a word but you can choose where to place in sentence. Stressing the different word can change the meaning.

-Submitted by Chirag

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Sentence stress refers to the arrangement of emphasized and deemphasized words within a sentence. When speaking in English, some syllables are uttered louder than others. Stressed syllables are those that are uttered with greater force than the others. Unstressed syllables are those that are uttered softly. According to Roach (1993, p. 85–86), stressed syllables are distinguished from unstressed syllables by their greater significance. This is the one trait that all stressed syllables share in common.

It would be worthwhile to use Clifford et al. (1985, p. 19) to emphasize how crucial it is to educate students to emphasize the proper syllables while pronouncing English words. They state that stress plays a crucial role in pronunciation and that the exact spot of the accent should always be learned with the word.

 

-Submitted  by  Muhammed Nahiyan ArchaValappil