Week 6: Stress

The focus of my practice and blog post this week is stress. What is stress? Celce Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin (1996) define stress as the increase in energy and respiratory activity in producing sounds. The result of this increase is a longer, louder, and higher pitch sound. Thus, a stressed syllable will be perceived by the listener as longer, louder, and higher in pitch. Stress is very important in English for different stress patterns in a word may result in different meaning especially with homographs (words which have the same spelling as in record which can be a verb or a noun depending on the stress). Thus, putting the stress on the wrong syllable may hinder communication since the listener will not be able to hear the intended word.

Discussing stress cannot be separated from discussing reduced vowel. If stressed syllable is pronounced longer, louder, and higher in pitch, an unstressed syllable is usually reduced into a schwa /ə/ or into a lax high front vowel /ɪ/. For example, I could hear these reduced vowels in the first syllable of /ˈdəˈzɜːtɪd/, and in the second syllable of /ˈpraɪvət/.

Stress also occurs in the sentence level. Speakers of English put stresses on the words which convey important information in their sentences. Thus, usually the stressed words are content words instead of function word. It can be clearly heard that function words are almost always unstressed except when the speakers need them for emphasizing certain information. It can also be noticed from the archetype that when words are unstressed in the sentence, especially function words such as prepositions, determiners, and pronouns, the vowels in the words are reduced. The reduced vowels in these unstressed words are reduced either into a schwa /ə/ or into a lax high front vowel /ɪ/.

It is interesting because speakers can have different emphasis by putting the stress in different words in a sentence. I found a good cartoon to illustrate this phenomenon from word stress rule website. Here is the cartoon:

The cartoon shows how the same sentence can convey different messages to the listener.

Same as in North American English dialect, the British Received Pronunciation also definitely applies word-level and sentence-level stresses. So, for this project, I tried to listen to the word-level stress first, and then listen to the sentence-level stress. I use my archetype's IPA transcription again for this activity. This time, I added the stress symbol ˈ in front of every stressed syllable. Afterward, I tried to listen to the sentence-level stress and put a green highlight on the words that I thought as stressed more than other words. I found it more challenging to listen to the sentence-level stress than to the word-level stress. Due to the way the speakers pronounce the words, I heard that the content words almost have the same stress. I could hear the different between functions and content words, but could not really catch the different among the content words.

Here is my notes on the stress:

Afterward, I tried to record myself again and here is the result:

For next week, I will focus my practice on rhythm.