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Stress

The document discusses four basic types of word stress that are important for proper intonation in English: tonic stress, emphatic stress, contrastive stress, and new information stress. Tonic stress refers to the most stressed syllable in an intonation unit. Emphatic stress emphasizes words to call attention to something extraordinary. Contrastive stress points out differences between objects. New information stress is used to provide requested information in responses.

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36 views3 pages

Stress

The document discusses four basic types of word stress that are important for proper intonation in English: tonic stress, emphatic stress, contrastive stress, and new information stress. Tonic stress refers to the most stressed syllable in an intonation unit. Emphatic stress emphasizes words to call attention to something extraordinary. Contrastive stress points out differences between objects. New information stress is used to provide requested information in responses.

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Adrian Villanea
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© © All Rights Reserved
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By

Kenneth Beare



Updated on July 31, 2019

Improving sentence intonation is one of the key elements in English


pronunciation. The four basic types of word stress that lead to
proper intonation in English are:

 Tonic stress
 Emphatic stress
 Contrastive stress
 New information stress

Tonic Stress
Tonic stress refers to the syllable in a word which receives the most stress in an
intonation unit. An intonation unit has one tonic stress. It's important to
remember that a sentence can have more than one intonation unit, and therefore
have more than one tonic stress.

Here are some examples of intonation units with the tonic stress bolded:

 He's waiting
 He's waiting / for his friend
 He's waiting / for his friend / at the station

Generally, the final tonic stress in a sentence receives the most stress. In the
above example, 'station' receives the strongest stress.

There are a number of instances in which the stress changes from this standard.

Emphatic Stress
If you decide to emphasize something, you can change the stress from the
principal noun to another content word such as an adjective (big, difficult, etc.),
intensifier (very, extremely, etc.) This emphasis calls attention to the
extraordinary nature of what you want to emphasize.

For example:

 That was a difficult test. - Standard statement


 That was a difficult test. - Emphasizes how difficult the test was

There are a number of adverbs and modifiers which tend to be used to emphasize
in sentences that receive emphatic stress:

 Extremely
 Terribly
 Completely
 Utterly
 Especially

Contrastive Stress
Contrastive stress is used to point out the difference between one object and
another. Contrastive stress tends to be used with determiners such as 'this, that,
these and those'.

For example:

 I think I prefer this color.


 Do you want these or those curtains?

Contrastive stress is also used to bring out a given word in a sentence which will
also slightly change the meaning.

 He came to the party yesterday. (It was he, not someone else.)
 He walked to the party yesterday. (He walked, rather than drove.)
 He came to the party yesterday. (It was a party, not a meeting or
something else.)
 He came to the party yesterday. (It was yesterday, not two weeks ago or
some other time.)

New Information Stress


When asked a question, the requested information is naturally stressed more
strongly.

For example:

 Where are you from? - I come from Seattle, in the USA.


 What do you want to do? - I want to go bowling.
 When does class begin? - The class begins at nine o'clock.
Use these various types of stress to help improve your pronunciation and
understandability.

https://www.thoughtco.com/esl-intonation-stress-types-1212091

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