STRESS

STRESS
1. In general usage, a word associated with emphasis, significance, tension, and strain.

2. Also ACCENT. In poetics and phonetics, a term for the property by means of which syllables and words become prominent: that is, they are made to stand out from their background.

Phonetic prominence

Stress is not a single phonetic feature, stressed syllables having different kinds of phonetic prominence: (1) Prominence of pitch. A syllable is made prominent by a pitch movement on the syllable or by a pitch discontinuity involving a jump from the immediately preceding pitch. (2) Prominence of duration. Stressed syllables have full duration and may be prolonged, whereas unstressed syllables are likely to be shortened. (3) Prominence of vowel quality. Stressed syllables retain full vowel quality, whereas unstressed syllables may have weak vowels. (4) Prominence of loudness. Stressed syllables are generally said to be loud (although this is probably the least important kind of prominence for the recognition of stress in English). Stressed syllables with pitch prominence are said to be accented and a pitch contour or tone is associated with each accent.

Word stress

A property which makes some syllables in a word stand out. In writing and print, a stressed syllable is conventionally marked with the stress mark (ˈ) placed immediately before the syllable in phonetics and most contemporary dictionaries (but placed after it in many older works). The word ˈforeign is stressed on the first syllable, and deˈscribe on the second. Longer words may have two or more stresses, in which case the main stress is referred to as primary stress and others as secondary stress. Secondary stress is marked with the stress mark (ˌ). The word phoˈtography has just one stress on the second syllable, but ˌphotoˈgraphic has primary stress on the third syllable and secondary stress on the first, while ˈphotoˌgraph has primary stress on the first syllable and secondary stress on the third.

It is rare for unrelated English words to be distinguished solely by stress, as in beˈlow, ˈbillow. More commonly, related disyllabic words are stressed on different syllables, and the unstressed syllables may be reduced, for example, the verb construct is /kənˈstrʌkt/ and the noun construct is /ˈkɔnstrʌkt/. When a word is pronounced in isolation, it is treated as a tone group. The primary stress is the nucleus, and in isolation it is given a falling tone: ←foreign, de←scribe. A secondary stress before the primary stress is the onset, which normally takes a level tone: photo←graphic. A secondary stress after the primary stress is an unreduced syllable in the tail of the tone group. See TONE.

Sentence stress

The process whereby some words in an utterance are made prominent while others remain in the background, as in: THAT is the END of the NEWS. In strict phonetic terms, sentence stress is a misnomer, as the domain of these patterns is not the sentence but the tone group. In general, lexical words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs in -ly) have sentence stress, unless they refer to information already provided, in which case the resulting pattern is contrastive stress. Grammatical words are more likely to be unstressed, and may be reduced to weak forms.

Contrastive stress

The process by which stress is used to imply a contrast, as in MARY can go (not Susan) and Mary CAN go (she is free to do so). A fall-rise tone with a wide pitch range is often associated with contrast: I can't go on ↗ MONday leads to the implication ‘but I can go some other day’. Whole words can be contrasted in a similar way in many languages, but English is unusual in that parts of words can be contrasted: I wouldn't say she's an emplo ↗ YEE she is actually an emplo YER. In such cases, the normal pattern of word stress is overridden. The term is also used to refer to a stress pattern relating a sentence to its context: without preceding information, the sentence Ram's got a motorbike is likely to be stressed on the first and last words, RAM'S got a MOTorbike. On the other hand, RAM'S got a motorbike belongs to a context where possessing a motorbike is already under discussion and motorbike is not given sentence stress because it is not in contrast with anything else (bicycle, car).

Stress and weak forms

The RHYTHM of English leads to special reduced forms in some monosyllabic grammatical words in unstressed contexts: in isolation, the words an, from, his are pronounced /æn, frɔm, hɪz/, but in context are usually reduced to /ən, frəm, əz/. The process of reduction includes replacing the vowel with a weak vowel, usually schwa, and dropping an initial /h/. If the vowel is lost altogether, the result is a contraction, represented in informal writing by an apostrophe replacing the missing vowel: she's here. Although a consonant may also have been dropped (for example, the h of has in She's arrived), this is not normally indicated. Weak forms are natural in all native varieties of English, even in slow, careful speech. This also applies to the dropping of /h/ from weak forms, which is different from the dropping of h from accented syllables, which is not normal in some varieties, such as RP, and is widely stigmatized in BrE.

Stress shift

It is a common feature of English that when derivative words are formed by means of certain suffixes, the (primary) stress shifts from a particular syllable in the base word to a new syllable in the derived word: átom/atómic, cómplex/compléxity, devélopment/developméntal (with appropriate adaptations in the fullness or weakness of the vowels). Such stress shift or accent shift occurs only in words of French, Latin, and Greek background, in terms of particular suffixes, such as -ic, -ity, -al, and not in words of vernacular Germanic background.