Types of stress

Word stress – is singling out one or more syllables in a which are made prominent due to the force, pitch, quality and quantity.

In achieving special pronounce of stress all syllables in different languages 2 components usually play the reading role, thus all languages can be roughly divided into 2 groups that include:

dynamic stress

musical stress

The dynamic stress implies greater force with which stressed syllables are pronounced. European languages like English, German, French and also Russian have this type of stress.

The musical stress implied that the meaning of the word is effected by the pitch level and direction. This is the case with Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and some African languages. One and the same word pronounced with level rising or falling tone has different meanings. In some languages both types of word stress play an equal role. This is the case with Scandinavian languages.

Degree of stress

Degree of stress in a word may differ. As Васильев points out a polysyllabic word can have as many degreed of stress as there are syllables in it. As far as the degree of stress is concerned, the position of British and American linguists differ.

British phoneticians distinguish 3 degrees of stress in the word.

Primary – the main stress

Secondary – is the second strongest in the word

Weak stress – all he others.

So the syllables that have primary and secondary stresses can be called stressed. Those that have weak stress are called unstressed.

A different system is offered by American linguists. They distinguish 4 degrees of stress:

primary

secondary

tertiary

weak

It is quite clear that the difference between secondary and tertiary stress is subtle and subjective, and there are still no criteria to differentiate between them. For example, in the word “recognition” the 1st syllable has got secondary stress according to British linguists and tertiary stress according to Americans. In American English the words with suffixes –ory, -ate get the tertiary stress (“territory”)

Position of the stress

We can distinguish languages with fixed and free stress. In English and Russian the word stress is free. That means it may fall almost on any syllable and is not confined to any position in a word. In French and Polish the stress is fixed. In French the last syllable is usually stressed, in Finnish the first. The free stress in English has 2 subtypes:

constant

shifting

A constant stress is the stress that remains on the same morphemes in different grammatical forms and different derivates: “terror”, “terrible”, “terrified”. The stress is shifting when it may shift from one syllable to another in different parts of speech and different forms of the same word: “ignore”, “ignorant”; “politics”, “politician”

In spite of the fact that both Russian and English are characterized by free stress. The placement of stress in Russian is unpredictable. In English the freedom is restricted by certain tendencies.

VOPROS