from Part II - The Sound System of English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2011
In this unit you will learn about:
word accent/stress
rhythms in English
contracted forms
strong and weak forms
intonation.
Word Accent/Stress
The beauty of the English language lies in pronunciation. Accent/stress lends naturalness and beauty to your English. If you can't pronounce words clearly and stress properly, your English might sound like ‘Tinglish’, ‘Tamlish’ or ‘Hinglish’! In phonetics, accent/stress means expending extra breath on a particular syllable in a word. It is a matter of greater prominence and greater audibility.
Accent is very important to make your speech intelligible. For instance, look at the words career /kəriə/ and carrier /kæriə/. Looking at the transcription you can say there is a slight difference between the two in pronunciation. But you can bring out the difference between the two very clearly by accenting them on the right syllables. So in the word career /kə̍riə/ the accent is on the second syllable and in the word carrier /̍kæriə/ the accent is on the first syllable.
The mark (') on the top of a syllable in a word indicates that the particular syllable is stressed. This is known as primary stress. Primary stress indicates that the syllable is more prominent than the other syllables. There might also be a mark below on a syllable in a word. This is known as secondary stress. This indicates that this particular syllable is the next most prominent syllable. But for our speech purposes primary accent is the most important one.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.