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عدد الرسائل : 173 التميز والابداع : 6 تاريخ التسجيل : 20/06/2008
| موضوع: Word Stress الأحد مارس 14, 2010 1:29 am | |
| Word Stress
What is word stress?
In order to understand word stress it’s important to first look at 2 features of English pronunciation:
o Syllables o Silent letters
Every word in English is made up of 1, 2, 3 or more syllables. A syllable is a word or part of a word which has only one vowel sound. Let’s look at some examples:
book 1 syllable teacher 2 syllables (tea – cher) Saturday 3 syllables (Sat – ur – day)
Often it’s difficult to see how many syllables there are in a word because of silent letters. Let’s have a look at one example:
ting teres in
When you see the word “interesting” you might think there are 4 syllables: in – ter – res – ting. In fact there are only 3 syllables, because the first e is silent: in – tres - ting
English words are full of silent letters, because English is not a phonetic language. This makes it very difficult to know how many syllables a word has. There are only 2 ways to be sure:
o Listen carefully to the word being spoken o Look up the word in a dictionary (you will need to know the phonemic script to do this)
Now let’s look at word stress. In every English word one of the syllables has more importance than the others and is stressed. How? There are 5 features of a stressed syllable:
o It is longer o It is louder o It has a higher pitch o It is clearer o You must move your mouth and lips more to produce it
We can represent the stressed syllable like this:
O o o interesting (the first syllable is stressed)
Why is word stress important?
There are 3 reasons
o Stressing the wrong syllable in a word can make it very difficult to understand o Stressing a different syllable can sometimes change the meaning of the word o O O o desert desert o If the stress is wrong, your listener can feel stressed!
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