Sentence stress. Types of sentence stress. Notation of stresses and tunes in the text.

In a sentence or an intonation group some of the words are greater importance than the others. This largely depends on the situation or context. Words which provide most of the information are brought out in speech by means of sentence-stress. Thus sentence stress is a special prominence given to one or more words according to their relative importance in a sentence.

The main function of sentence-stress is to single out the communicativecentreof the sentence which introduces new information. The prominence is realized by variations of pitch, force, length and quality. The syllables of the words marked by sentence-stress are pronounced with possible changes in pitch, greater force, greater length of vowels and their full quality, that is the stressed words are pronounced more distinctly. The most prominent part of a sentence is the last stressed word which takes the nuclear tone.

The adjoining unstressed words are called proclitics when they precede the stressed words and enclitics when they follow the stressed words.

The distribution of stresses in a sentence depends on the mantic value of words and is closely connected with the lexical and grammatical structure of the sentence.

There are differentiate three types of sentence-stress:

1. normal (or syntactical) sentence-stress,

2. logical sentence-stress,

3. emphatic sentence-stress.

1. Normal stress affects content words which convey the necessary information to the listener, eg: We have plenty of time.

Normal sentence-stress is used to arrange words into sentences or intonation groups phonetically.

2. The position of the last sentence-stress determines the place of the nucleus of the communicative centre. By shifting the position of the last stress we can change the place of the nucleus of the communicative centre, eg: Nelly 'spoke to him yesterday.

Logically different messages are expressed in the given sentences. Each shifting of the stress modifies the meaning of the sentence.

3. Most human utterances express not only the speaker's thoughts, but also his feelings and attitudes to reality and to the contents of the sentence. Both normal and logical stresses can be unemphatic or emphatic. Emphatic stress increases the effort of expression. It may strengthen the stressed word making it still more prominent. Emphatic stress manifests itself mainly on the High Fall or the Rise-Fall of the nuclear syllable. Emphatic stress is a powerful expressive means. It is the highest degree of logical and emotional prominence of words in a phrase.

<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
Intonation and its components. The intonation group. Terminal tones.	\|	The usage of tunes in statements, different types of questions, commands, exclamations.

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