Stress (linguistics)
From Freepedia
In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence).
The way stress manifests itself in the speech stream is highly language-dependent. In some languages, stressed syllables have a higher pitch than non-stressed syllables — so-called pitch accent (or musical accent). There are also the following types of accents: force accent (also known as dynamic accent), quantitative accent, qualitative accent.
English is a so-called stress-timed language; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. Stressed syllables in English also have higher pitch than unstressed ones.
Stressed syllables are often perceived as more forceful or louder than non-stressed syllables. Research has shown, however, that vocal stress does not imply louder phonation, nor more forceful articulatory gestures.
Some languages have fixed stress, ie. stress is placed always on a given syllable, as in French (where words are always stressed in the last syllable), Finnish and Hungarian (stress always on the first syllable) or Quechua and Polish (always on the penultima -- the syllable before the last one). Other languages have stress placed on different syllables in a predictable way (they're said to have a regular stress rule), such as Latin.
There are also languages like English or Spanish, where stress is unpredictable and arbitrary, being lexical; that is, it comes as part of the word and must be learned with it, although orthography can make stress unambiguous for any reader, as it happens in Portuguese. In this kind of language two words can differ only by the position of the stress, and therefore it's possible to use stress as a derivative or inflectional device. English shows this with noun/verb pairs such as to record ("to register, to inscribe") vs. a record ("a register, an entry"), where the verb is stressed on the last syllable and the corresponding noun is stressed on the first. Further, many words have different stresses in British English and American English.
In Romance languages, stress takes part in the verb conjugation and it produces an interesting phenomenon by which the vowels /e/ and /o/ in the root of some verbs become diphthongs when stressed. For example, in Spanish the verb volver has the forms volví, volviste, volvió in the past, and vuelvo, vuelves, vuelve in the present. In these Spanish verbs, stressed /o/ becomes /ue/ and stressed /e/ becomes /ie/ (Italian has /o/ → /uo/ instead). This behaviour is not confined to verbs; there are many examples of vocabulary where diphthongs /ie/ or /ue/ are used in stressed syllables where /e/ or /o/ are used in Latin cognates or unstressed positions in Spanish cognates (e.g. compare viento, ventilación, Latin ventum).
Contents |
Degrees of stress
Primary and secondary stress are distinguished in some languages. English is commonly believed to have primary and secondary stress, and primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary stress levels are sometimes described.
However, linguists such as Peter Ladefoged believe these levels are not phonemic, and report that not all alleged secondary stress is characterized by the increase in respiratory activity associated with stress. Rather, a syllable in English may be stressed or unstressed, and if unstressed, the vowel may be full or reduced. In addition, the last stressed syllable in an intonation unit receives additional tonic or intonational stress. That is, a combination of lexical stress, phrase- or clause-final prosody, and the reduction of some unstressed vowels conspires to create multiple levels of phonetic stress, or at least the impression of such levels. A syllable with both lexical and prosodic stress in Ladefoged's account corresponds to primary stress in the traditional account; a syllable with only lexical stress corresponds to secondary stress; an unstressed syllable with a full vowel also corresponds to secondary stress in the primary-secondary account, or to tertiary stress in the fuller account; and an unstressed syllable with a reduced vowel is said be unstressed or to have quaternary stress. In a phonemic transcription of English words that indicates reduced vowels like schwa, only the lexical stress is required. For example, cóunterfòil from the beginning of this article is only stressed on the first syllable; the last syllable is just an unreduced vowel. (Unstressed oi does not normally reduce in English.) In còunterintélligence both marked syllables are stressed; the apparent difference between them is due to prosody and disappears when the word is moved to non-final position. (For some speakers, the first syllable of this word may be unstressed but unreduced.)
Stress in poetry
Poetry in English depends upon stress to establish the meter of the poem. Stress is usually thought of as strong or weak. Some people distinguish a third, intermediate stress level.
For example: in the word reconsider, the stress pattern is ˌreconˈsider (intermediate - weak - strong - weak).
Notation
Different systems exist for indicating syllabification and stress.
- In IPA, primary stress is indicated by a high vertical line before the syllable, secondary stress by a low vertical line. Example: [sɪˌlæbɪfɪˈkeɪʃən].
- In ad hoc pronunciation guides, stress is often indicated using a combination of bold text and capital letters. Example: sill-lab-if-ick-KAY-shun.
- In Slavic-language dictionaries, stress is indicated with an accent mark on a syllable's vowel. Example: вимовля́ння.
- In Dutch, ad hoc indication of stress is usually done with an acute accent on the vowel, or the first two vowels in case of a diphtong, of the stressed syllable. Example: achterúítgang (deterioration) vs. áchteruitgang (back exit).
