Word Stress

Introduction

Word stress is one of the essential and crucial parts which play a great role in English language learning.

What is word stress and what are its features and why are they important to be identified:

According to Underhill (2005) Word stress is an expression used to describe the accent or a highlight given to a particular part of a word and it is relatively consistent element of a word when spoken in isolation. Stress may occur on the first, middle or on the last syllable in a word. Words of more than one syllable usually consist of stressed and unstressed syllables. In English there is a unique correlation between the different parts of a word. Words with two or more syllables usually have ‘prominence’ or ‘stress’ in one of its syllables; that syllable is apparent as more prominent, because of a multifaceted features such as loudness, length or change in the pitch than the other syllables in the word. If the learner does not stress one syllable more than the others, or stresses the wrong syllable, the listener may face a difficulty in identifying the word and this is due to the stress pattern of the word is a significant part of its identity for native speaker. According to Dalton and Seidlhofer (2000) there is great deal of evidence that native speakers rely very much on the stress patterns of words when they are listening. Underhill, (2005) states that the production of stress is generally whispered to depend on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables. In other words when the stressed syllable is produced, the muscles used to exorcize air from lungs are very active. Therefore stress considered as a powerful element in words.

There a...

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... syllable nouns, the ultimate syllable receives the main stress only if a long vowel is found, For example: machine, sister, insect and subject. In addition the stress of compound nouns is more obvious, words which formed from two separate words are usually stressed in the second syllables such as town centre and science fiction, whereas the main stress in words that formed from two joined words the stress is usually on the first word for example; basketball and greenhouse. In addition prefixes and suffixes are not usually stressed for example; repeat, because and original and quietly. According to Roach (2000, p: 102) “explaining word stress in terms of generative phonology could well create confusion for learners. Finding practice and testing material for word stress is very simple: any modern English dictionary shows word stress patterns as part of word entries”