Stress to Speak Good English - An Overview (Part -2)

People often aspire to speak "Perfect English, which also includes pronunciation. It plays an important role in identifying them as non-native speaker. Pronunciation consists of four aspects: Sounds, Stress, Linking, and Intonation.

We already covered Sounds in Part 1. Now, we will talk about the second component: Stress in this article.

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Do you know that English is known as a stressed Language?

Stressed languages are languages spoken with differing degrees of emphasis on the words and syllables in the sentences.

Listeners depend on stress as a cue to understand what you are speaking. Word stress errors can easily cause listeners to be unable to identify the word the speaker is saying and, therefore, unable to identify the boundary between words. You also risk tiring listeners if you stress all or most syllables in words equally because they will have to make too much effort to recognize words when they should be paying attention to your message.

Stress is the relative emphasis given to certain syllables in a word or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. English speakers use stress to highlight information they think is important. English stress is as significant as English sounds. Every English word of more than one syllable has a dictionary-defined stress pattern.

Stress has three primary characteristics:

1. Length

2. Volume

3. Pitch

Stressed vowel sounds are longer, louder, and higher in pitch than vowel sounds without stress. You can use just one of these features or any combination of these features at the same time. Overall, stressed sounds are "stronger" than unstressed sounds.

Let's take an example of the word "computer"

• com p-u-ter - It is longer

• comPUTer – It is louder

• It changes pitch from the syllables coming before and afterward. The pitch of a stressed syllable is usually higher.

Syllables in English words have different levels of loudness. Some are loud, some are short and quiet, and some are in between.

English has three levels of stress:

• Primary stress: the loudest syllable in the word. In one-syllable words, that one syllable has the primary stress

• Secondary stress: syllables that aren't completely unstressed but aren't as loud as the primary stress.

• Unstressed syllables: syllables that have no stress at all. In English, almost all of these have schwa [ə] for their vowel.

Stress can be divided into two groups:

1. Word stress: We accentuate or stress one syllable in the word. We say one part of a word a little bit louder, a bit longer, or a slightly different pitch. Let's check some examples to understand it better. In the examples below, bold letters indicate stressed syllables.

telephone -> telephone

protest -> protest

transfer -> transfer

bookshop -> bookshop

demonstration ->	demonstration

appreciated -> appreciated

admiration -> admiration

remind -> remind

We can see that stress sometimes occurs in the first part of the word, the first syllable, and sometimes in the middle of the word. There is no stress if the word is short, like cat or dog.

There are many factors that can influence where the stress falls in a word. For example, the addition of suffixes or prefixes can change the position of the stress.

A word can only have one stress, which is called the primary stress. In a very long word, you can have secondary stress, but it is always a much smaller stress.

2. Stresses words within sentences: Another type of stress is inside a sentence; here, we emphasize one part. Not all words receive equal stress within a sentence in English. Emphasis is put on the most important words. But what's important changes depending on the context

Example: "this is a pen" can be spoken in different ways with stress given on different words:

this is a pen – It will emphasize it as pen, not pencil. 

this is a pen – emphasizing this to compare it to, note that this is a pen. 

This is a pen – which emphasizes the quantity, in this case, one. 

We can use sentence stress to emphasize something. Now there's a default sentence stress. If you use the default version, there's no special emphasis. It's just the normal meaning.

It is a general rule of English that when there is a sequence of equal stresses, the last stressed word should be the strongest or the loudest - which in the above case would be pen.

When you speak every word and sentence in your speech without any stress, you sound monotonous and boring.

Where to place stress:

Unfortunately, there is no simple rule for determining where the stress falls in a word. However, some common features affect the stress in a word, such as words with prefixes or suffixes, the origin of a word, or the grammatical function. Below is a short list of more common stress patterns found in English.

• The Two-Syllable Noun and Verbs - In nouns, the first syllable has primary stress, and the second syllable is unstressed. In verbs, the first syllable is unstressed, and the second syllable has primary stress. About 80% of two-syllable words get their stress on the first syllable.

Example:

jacket, winter

the record (noun), to record (verb)

a present (noun), to present (verb)

• Suffix and Prefix Rules - Words with–a prefix or a suffix–will typically alter the stress pattern of a word.

If a word contains a prefix, such as pre-, dis-, ex-, re-, over-, under-, etc., a good rule to follow is that the stress will fall on the first syllable of the root word.

Example:

undo, understand

Suffix rules are not as easy as prefixes. Some suffixes are stressed, and other suffixes move the stress one or two syllables to the left of the word.

Example:

Employee (stress the suffix "ee")

electrician (stress the syllable before suffix – "tion")

vocabulary (stress two syllables before suffix "ary")

• The Compound Noun Rule- Compound nouns are two words that are put together, such as: "thunder" + "storm" = "thunderstorm.". Primary stress is on the word's first syllable, and secondary stress is on the first syllable of the second word in the compound.

Example:

Schoolboy, blackboard

“Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell

Conclusion

During a conversation, learners should listen for stressed content words to understand the whole sentence's meaning.

Working on word stress can help you to be better understood and become a more confident speaker.

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