Stress in simple words

Stress in simple words

1. The nature of stress

   • Production
     • Depend on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables.
   • Perception
     • Many different sound characteristics are important in making a syllable recognisably stressed
       • Prominence
         • (i)Loudness (ii)Length (iii)Pitch (iv)Quality

2. Levels of Stress

   • Primary stress
     • The prominence that results from this pitch movement, or tone, gives the strongest type of stress.
   • Secondary stress
     • A type of stress that is weaker than primary stress but stronger than that of the first syllable of 'around'. It is usually represented in transcription with a low mark ()
   • Unstressed
     • Third level and is regarded as being the absence of any recognisable amount of prominence.

3. Placement of stress within the word

   • i)Whether the word is morphologically simple, or whether it is complex as a result either of containing one or more affixes (i.e. prefixes or suffixes) or of being a compound word. ii)What the grammatical category of the word is (noun, verb, adjective, etc.). iii)How many syllables the word has. iv)What the phonological structure of those syllables is.
     • Strong syllables can be stressed. Weak syllables are always unstressed.