Sentencestress.docVIP

SENTENCE STRESS Like words, sentences in English have stressed and unstressed elements in it causing your speech to have a rhythm. The stressed words are higher in pitch and are held longer. The unstressed words are usually said quickly. A) Content words (carries meaning; stressed) Nouns (kitchen, Peter, Africa) (most) principal verbs (manage, visit, construct) Adjectives (beautiful, interesting) Adverbs (often, carefully) Question words (who, what where, when, why, how) B) Structure words (doesn’t carry meaning by itself; unstressed) The unstressed words in between the content words are called structure words. They are important to the grammatical structure of speech and to the rhythm. Structure words can be hard to hear clearly because the vowels are weak and short. Articles (the, a) Auxiliary verbs (am, can, were) Prepositions (of, to, at, before, next to, opposite) Conjunctions (and, but, while, as) Pronouns (they, she, us, he, she) Tap The Rhythm Tap the desk for each stressed content word as you say the sentences. See how the structure words are quickly gone over without being stressed. Beat 1 (tap) Beat 2 (tap) Beat 3 (tap) PEOple PLANT TREES The PEOple are PLANTing TREES The PEOple have PLANTed some TREES The PEOple should have PLANTed some more TREES All words are not equal! Stress-timed nature of English: The length of an utterance depends not on the number of syllables but rather on the number of stresses. C) Prominence (the most strongly stressed) It would be confusing if all the content words were stressed equally or were said at the same pitch. The prominence gets the strongest stress to call attention to what is most important. In a basic pattern, the prominence is usually the last content word in each thought group* or short sentence. We DROVE in the DARK. I SAT in the LAST ROW. I KNOW WHO her FATHER is. Some CREDit CARD COMpanies / OFFer LOW INterest / but they CHARGE an ANNual FEE. // She WANTS to beCOME an inTERpr