Stress

Stress

Stress is the effort we exert for the production of some sound. We do not exert equal effort for the production of all the sounds because some syllables are uttered with greater breath effort and muscular energy than the others. The syllables which are uttered with greater muscular energy are louder and longer those are what we call stresses.

In English language, there are three degrees of stress namely: primary stress, secondary stress and un-stress. The syllables which are uttered with great muscular energy are said to be stressed while those produced with less effort are un-stressed. A stress syllable is written in capital letter.

Word Stress

In speech, we use words of one, two, or more syllables, we have monosyllable words which are usually stressed when pronounced in isolation. Syllable is the smallest unit that a word can be divided into. The stress could be at the beginning or middle or last part of the word e.g. “potato” the stresses are on the second syllable PoTAto. We do not have any rules guiding the stress pattern of words in English but if a word has two syllables, the first syllable is usually stressed. In cases where the first syllable is a prefix, the second syllable has the stress and the first syllable is unstressed e.g.

First syllable words stress                          Second syllable stress

INcrease               WINdow                        ExCEED

HOStile                DOCtor                          CanTEEN

Cover                                                        PreTEND

Pillow                                                       UnkNOWN

TAble                                                        UnTIL

UnLESS

Sentence Stress

A sentence in English contain word of different classes. Some of these seem to be relatively more important than the others. The distinction is indicated by stressing the apparently mere important words while the less important ones are unstressed on the basis of their functions in a sentence. Words are classified into two; the first is called content words comprising the nouns, verbs adverbs and adjectives. The second group of words are called the Grammatical words comprising the prepositions, articles, conjunction, pronouns and auxiliary verbs, while the control words are stressed in English language, the grammatical words are not usually stressed e.g. The CAR has been STOPPED only the two content words “car” and “stopped” are stressed while the others which are grammatical words are not stressed in order to maintain the rhythmic pattern of the language.

In some cases stresses does an important grammatical function of differentiating classes of words with the same spelling e.g. a word may function as a noun in one context as a verb in another. The stress pattern changes to reflect the change in function and meaning of such a word.

The stresses pattern on a word determined what part of speech that word becomes either a noun, a verb, if the stresses are on the first syllable it is noun but if the stress pattern is on the second syllable it becomes a verb. E.g.

Noun                                      verb

OBject                                     ObJECT

CONtest                                  ConTEST

TRANSport                              TransPORT

IMport                                     ImPORT

CONvert                                  conVERT