syllable and stress

Prepared by:

Pir Azrar Ahmed Chishti

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Syllable

Defintion

A unit/cluster of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word.

Water

Syllable Type Examples Definition

Closeddap-plehos-telbev-er-age

A syllable with a short vowel, spelled with a single vowel letter ending in one or more consonants.

Vowel-Consonant-e(VCe)

com-petedes-pite

A syllable with a long vowel, spelled with one vowel + one consonant + silent e.

Openpro-gramta-blere-cent

A syllable that ends with a long vowel sound, spelled with a single vowel letter.

Vowel Team(including diphthongs)

aw-fultrain-ercon-gealspoil-age

Syllables with long or short vowel spellings that use two to four letters to spell the vowel. Diphthongs ou/ow and oi/oyare included in this category.

Vowel-r (r-controlled)

in-jur-i-ouscon-sortchar-ter

A syllable with er, ir, or, ar, or ur. Vowel pronunciation often changes before /r/.

Consonant-le(C-le)

drib-blebea-glelit-tle

An unaccented final syllable that contains a consonant before /l/, followed by a silent e.

Leftovers: Odd and Schwa syllables

dam-ageact-ivena-tion

Usually final, unaccented syllables with odd spellings.

Types of words according to Syllables1) Monosyllabic words

A word that consists of a single syllable (dog) is called a monosyllable and is said to be monosyllabic. 

2) Disyllabic Words A word of two syllables is known as disyllable (disyllabic). 3) Trisyllabic words

A word of three syllables is called as trisyllable (and trisyllabic) 4) Polysyllabic words polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to

any word of more than one syllable.

Stress

Stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word.

Types of Stress

Emphatic Stress One reason to move

the tonic stress from its utterance final position is to assign an emphasis to a content word, which is usually a modal auxiliary, an intensifier, an adverb, etc.

i. It was very BOring. (unmarked) ii. It was VEry boring. (emphatic)

Contrastive Stress

In contrastive contexts, the stress pattern is quite different from the emphatic and non-emphatic stresses in that any lexical item in an utterance can receive the tonic stress provided that the contrastively stressed item can be contrastable in that universe of speech. No distinction exists between content and function words regarding this.Do you like this one or THAT one?

b) I like THIS one.

Tonic Stress An intonation unit almost always has

one peak of stress, which is called 'tonic stress', or 'nucleus'. Because stress applies to syllables, the syllable that receives the tonic stress is called 'tonic syllable'.

I'm going. I'm going to London.

New Information Stress In a response given to a wh-question, the

information supplied, naturally enough, is stressed,. That is, it is pronounced with more breath force, since it is more prominent against a background given information in the question. a) What's your NAME

b) My name's Azrar.

  Word Stress

Word Stress is the singling out of one or more syllables in a word, which is accompanied by the change of the force of utterance, pitch of the voice, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the sound which is usually a vowel.

Analysis of word stress is carried out according to the parameters: The nature of English word-stress; Its degree and syllabic location; Its functions;

Sentence Stress Sentence stress makes the utterance understandable to the listener by

making the important words in the sentence stressed, clear and higher in pitch and by shortening the unstressed words.

Sentence stress provides rhythm in connected speech. Most sentences have two types of word: content words function words Content words are the key words of a sentence. They are the important

words that carry the meaning or sense. They are usually stressed. Function words are articles. They are usually unstressed.

Patterns of Stress in Syllables

Monosyllabic Words   Monosyllabic words with one syllable

are stressed. (but normally they do not carry stress marks in dictionaries because the stress is on the one and the same syllable).

e.g: farm, struck, saw, floor, reach, work, lose. Disyllabic Words Disyllabic words may have the stress

on the first syllable or on the second syllable. Stress on the first syllable :

’visit, ’city, ’recent, ’knowledge, ’solar.

Multi/Polysyllabic words  Polysyllabic words

gave the stress on any one of the syllablesStress on the first syllable :

’popular, ’telegram, ’atmosphere, ’mechanism, ’grandfather.

Stress on second syllable :in’volvement, la’boratory, a’rrangement, ex’periment, in’terpreet.

Stress on the third syllable :availa’bility, communi’cation, under’stand, integ’ration.

Degrees of Stress There are four degrees of words stress as they are given below; Primary stress It is the stronger degree of stress. Primary stress gives the final stressed syllable. Primary stress is very important in compound words. Secondary stress Secondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the

pronunciation of a word. Secondary stress gives the other lexically stressed syllables in a

word. Secondary stress is important primarily in long words with several

syllables.

Tertiary stress It includes the fully

unstressed vowels. An unstressed vowel is the vowel sound that forms the syllable peak of a syllable that has no lexical stress.

Quaternary stress It includes the reduced

vowels. Vowel reduction is the term in phonetics that refers to various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word which are perceived as "weakening.