Fonética suprasegmental

UNIDAD 3: STRESS RULES

IN ENGLISH
Definition of stress
The term stress may be defined in many different ways:

 From a production point of view: “Degree of force with which a sound or syllable is
uttered”. The production of stress is generally believed to depend on the speaker using
more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables.
 From a perception point of view: “stress refers to the degree of loudness”, with possibility
to be placed in a scale from soft to loud.
 Using both points of view at the same time: “Stress is speaking one of the syllables in a
word louder than the others.” “Other things being equal, one syllable is more prominent
than another to the extent that its constituent segments display higher pitch, greater
loudness, longer duration and greater articulatory excursion from the neutral disposition
of the vocal tract.”

Level of stress
In words with more than one syllable, there will always be one syllable which will be produced
with the greatest force or greatest muscular effort. This particular syllable will receive primary
stress (i.e. the greatest emphasis). Thus, primary stress refers to the most prominent syllable
within a word. “sister, convey, arrive, teacher, ….”

However, in some words we can observe a type of stress which is weaker than tonic strong
stress or primary stress, but stronger than totally unstressed syllables. That is the so-called
secondary stress or non-tonic strong stress. It refers to the second most prominent syllable
within a polysyllabic word. “Japanese, photographic, anthropology”

Unstressed syllables will be the ones which show the absence of any important recognisable
amount of prominence. “pathetic, kitchen”

Types of information used in stress assignment

rules
• In some languages the position of stress is invariable (French, Czech, Finnish), and they
are called stress fixed languages. However, English and Spanish are stress-variable
languages, that is, word stress is not fixed, but this does not mean that it is not
predictable.

• Stress assignment rules in English are based on three types of information:

Fonética suprasegmental

• (1) Syntactic information: Word category, what part of speech it is, whether it is
a noun or verb (insult, noun; insult, verb).

• (2) Morphological information: Certain suffixes have a role in the location of

stress (-tion, -ic, -ese, -oon).

• (3) Phonological information: Syllable count and syllable weight. The place of
stress in particular words depends in part on the nature of the last two syllables,
the ultimate and the penultimate, and occasionally on the nature of an earlier
syllable. We need to consider whether a syllable has a free vowel or not, and
the number of consonants, if any, which close the syllable.

Compounds and phrases

• In general, compound nouns are stressed on the first word of the compound (“tennis
ball”, “tennis racket”, “greenhouse”), though, there are numerous compound nouns
with the stress on each compound word (“apple pie”, “kitchen sink”).

• Syntactic groups –phrases- which consist of words of equal semantic weight typically
have a stress on each of the words and the unmarked accent falls on the last word of
the group (“a nice day”, “some interesting discussions”, “a green house”)