Teaching English Intonation to EFL/ESL Students
Stress
This section addresses the notion of stress in words as perceived in connected speech. In addition, the existence and discovery of tonic stress is discussed, and the major types of stress are explicated. Four major types of stress are identified:
- unmarked tonic stress
- emphatic stress
- contrastive stress
- new information stress
An important prosodic feature, 'stress' applies to individual syllables, and involves, most commonly, loudness, length, and higher pitch (Roach, 1983:73). Each of these features may contribute in differing degrees at different times. Stress is an essential feature of word identity in English (Kenworthy, 1987:18). It is evident that not all syllables of a polysyllabic English word receive the same level of stress; in connected speech, usually two levels of stress appear to be perceptible, to non-native speakers in particular, regardless of the number of syllables: stressed and unstressed (Ladefoged, 1973; Kenworthy, 1987). What is known as the primary stress is regarded as the stressed syllable while the rest, secondary, tertiary, and weak, are rendered as unstressed syllables.
At the clausal level, normally, words that carry higher information content in the utterance are given higher stress than those carrying lower input (information) and those that are predictable in the context. It is generally the case that one word is stressed more than any other since it possesses the highest information content for the discourse utterance, that is, it informs the hearer most. The group of words described above are largely from what is called 'content' words as opposed to 'function' words. Content words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs while function words are articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and modal auxiliaries. Furthermore, it is content words that are polysyllabic, not function words. This classification conforms to grammatical considerations. The classification we present here from a suprasegmental viewpoint, that is on the basis of being stressed or not, is slightly different from that of grammar. Consider the following:
Content/Stressed Words
Function/Unstressed Words
verbs
modal auxiliaries
nouns
articles
adjectives
conjunctions
adverbs
prepositions
question words
pronouns
prepositional adverbs
negatives
《Teaching English Intonation to EFL/ESL Students》