STRESS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

Many learners of English as a second language face a big problem in specifying stress of words. The present study aims at shedding some light on these important issues of word stress. Stress is usually associated with loudness or force, the force of a syllable or an utterance. The study has three sections and a conclusion.

In the first section, definitions of stress, stress as a phoneme, the relationship between word stress and sentence stress, the relationship among stress and other suprasegmentals, and degrees of stress are studied. A presentation of stress predictability of monosyllabic and bisyllabic nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs is the content of the second section. Section three deals with the relationship between morphology and phonology as far as stress is concerned.

The present study is primarily restricted to deal with word stress. Sentence stress needs a sophisticated analysis of other suprasegmentals like pitch and intonation. Examples are all authentic, and they are presented as in the original references. Also, we try to restrict our treatment and transcription to the Broad British Transcription (BBT) or Phonemic Transcription (PT), unless the discussion needs some reference to the American Transcription (AT).