Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word "accent" is often used with this sense, but it may be used for other kinds of prominence; stress specifically may thus be called stress accent or dynamic accent.

The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress or lexical stress. The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. The latter is one of the three components of prosody, along with rhythm and intonation.

Phonetic realization

The ways stress manifests itself in the speech stream are highly language-dependent. In some languages, stressed syllables have a higher or lower pitch than non-stressed syllables – this is called pitch accent (or musical accent). Other features that may characterize stressed syllables include dynamic accent (loudness), qualitative accent (differences in place or manner of articulation, typically a more peripheral articulation), and quantitative accent (syllable length, equivalent to agogic accent in music theory). Stress may be realized to varying degrees on different words in a sentence; sometimes the difference between the acoustic signals of stressed and unstressed syllables may be minimal.

The possibilities for stress in tone languages are an area of ongoing research, but stress-like patterns have been observed in Mandarin Chinese.^[1] They are realized as alternations between syllables where the tones are carefully realized with a relatively large swing in fundamental frequency, and syllables where they are realized "sloppily" with typically a small swing.

Stressed syllables are often perceived as being more forceful than non-stressed syllables. Research has shown, however, that although dynamic stress is accompanied by greater respiratory force, it does not mean a more forceful articulation in the vocal tract.

(Much literature emphasizes the importance of pitch changes and pitch motions on stressed syllables, but experimental support for this idea is weak. Nevertheless, most experiments do not directly address the pitch of speech, which is a subjective perceived quantity. Experiments typically measure the speech fundamental frequency, which is objectively measurable, and strongly correlated with pitch, but not quite the same thing.)

Lexical stress

Lexical stress, or word stress, is the stress placed on a given syllable in a word. The position of lexical stress in a word may depend on certain general rules applicable in the language or dialect in question, although in some languages it is largely unpredictable, needing to be "learned" for each individual word.

Languages in which the position of the stress can usually be predicted by a simple rule are said to have fixed stress. For example, in Czech, Finnish, Icelandic and Hungarian the stress almost always comes on the first syllable of a word; in Quechua and Polish the stress is almost always on the penultimate syllable; while in Macedonian it comes on the antepenult (third syllable from the end). Other languages have stress placed on different syllables but in a predictable way, as in Classical Arabic and Latin (where stress is conditioned by the structure of the penultimate syllable). They are said to have a regular stress rule.

French words are sometimes said to be stressed on the final syllable, although French has no lexical stress at all: instead, prosodic stress (see below) is placed on the final syllable (or, if that is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable) of a string of words, which may be equivalent to a clause or a phrase. When a word is said alone, its last syllable is also the end of the phrase, so the stress is placed there.

Languages in which the position of stress in a word is less predictable are said to have variable stress. This applies to English and Russian, and to some extent to Italian and Spanish. Here stress is truly lexical: it must be memorized as part of the pronunciation of an individual word. In such languages stress may be phonemic, in that it can serve to distinguish otherwise identical words; for example, the English words insight and incite are distinguished in pronunciation only by the fact that the stress falls on the first syllable in the former and on the second syllable in the latter. Other examples include umschreiben ("rewrite") vs. umschreiben ("paraphrase, outline") in German, земли́ (genitive of "earth, land") vs. зе́мли (plural of "earth, land") in Russian, ancora ("anchor") and ancora ("more, still, yet") in Italian. English compound nouns can change their meaning based on stress, as with paper bág (a bag made of paper) and páper bag (a bag for carrying newspapers).

Stress placement for some words may differ between dialects. For example, in British English the word labóratory is pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable, while American English stresses the first syllable, láboratory.

Some languages (such as Spanish and Modern Greek) mark the position of lexical stress in their orthography. See Spelling and notation for stress below.

Levels of stress

Some languages are described as having both primary stress and secondary stress. A syllable with secondary stress is stressed relative to unstressed syllables, but not as strongly as a syllable with primary stress. As with primary stress, the position of secondary stress may be more or less predictable depending on language. In English it is not fully predictable; for example, the words organization and accumulation both have primary stress on the fourth syllable, but the secondary stress comes on the first syllable in the former word and on the second syllable in the latter. In some analyses, for example the one found in Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English, English has been described as having four levels of stress: primary, secondary, tertiary, and "quaternary", but these treatments often disagree with each other.

Peter Ladefoged and other phoneticians have noted that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction.^[2] They believe that the multiple levels posited for English, whether primary–secondary or primary–secondary–tertiary, are mere phonetic detail and not true phonemic stress, and that often the alleged secondary stress is not characterized by the increase in respiratory activity normally associated with primary stress in English or with all stress in other languages.

Prosodic stress

Prosodic stress, or sentence stress, refers to stress patterns that apply at a higher level than the individual word – namely within a prosodic unit. It may involve a certain natural stress pattern characteristic of a given language, but may also involve the placing of emphasis on particular words because of their relative importance.

An example of a natural prosodic stress pattern is that described for French above; stress is placed on the final syllable of a string of words (or if that is a schwa, the next-to-final syllable). A similar pattern has been claimed for English (see Levels of stress above): the traditional distinction between (lexical) primary and secondary stress is replaced partly by a prosodic rule stating that the final stressed syllable in a phrase is given additional stress. (A word spoken alone becomes such a phrase, hence such prosodic stress may appear to be lexical if the pronunciation of words is analyzed in a standalone context rather than within phrases.)

Another type of prosodic stress pattern is quantity sensitivity – in some languages additional stress tends to be placed on syllables that are longer (moraically heavy).

Prosodic stress is also often used pragmatically to emphasize (focus attention on) particular words or the ideas associated with them. Doing this can change or clarify the meaning of a sentence; for example:

I didn't take the test yesterday. (Somebody else did.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did not take it.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I did something else with it.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took a different one.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took something else.)
I didn't take the test yesterday. (I took it some other day.)

In English, stress is most dramatically realized on focused or accented words. For instance, consider the dialogue

"Is it brunch tomorrow?"

"No, it's dinner tomorrow."

In it, the stress-related acoustic differences between the syllables of "tomorrow" would be small compared to the differences between the syllables of "dinner", the emphasized word. In these emphasized words, stressed syllables such as "din" in "dinner" are louder and longer.^[3][4][5] They may also have a different fundamental frequency, or other properties.

Stress and vowel reduction

In many languages, such as Russian and English, vowel reduction may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to schwa-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (see Stress and vowel reduction in English). The effect may be dependent on lexical stress (for example, the unstressed first syllable of the word photographer contains a schwa, whereas the stressed first syllable of photograph does not), or on prosodic stress (for example, the word of is pronounced with a schwa when it is unstressed within a sentence, but not when it is stressed.

Most languages, such as Finnish and the mainstream dialects of Spanish, do not have unstressed vowel reduction; in these languages vowels in unstressed syllables have nearly the same quality as those in stressed syllables.

Stress and rhythm

Some languages, such as English, are said to be stress-timed languages; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. This contrasts with languages that have syllable timing (e.g. Spanish) or mora timing (e.g. Japanese), where syllables or moras are spoken at a roughly constant rate regardless of stress. For details, see Isochrony.

Historical effects of stress

It is common for stressed and unstressed syllables to behave differently as a language evolves. For example, in the Romance languages, the original Latin short vowels /e/ and /o/ have generally become diphthongs when stressed. Since stress takes part in verb conjugation, this has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages. For example, the Spanish verb volver has the form volví in the past tense but vuelvo in the present tense (see Spanish irregular verbs). Italian shows the same phenomenon but with /o/ alternating with /uo/ instead. This behaviour is not confined to verbs; for example, Spanish viento "wind", from Latin ventum; or Italian fuoco from Latin focum'.

Spelling and notation for stress

The orthographies of some languages include devices for indicating the position of lexical stress. Some examples are listed below.

• In Modern Greek, all polysyllables are written with an acute accent over the vowel in the stressed syllable. (The acute accent is also used on some monosyllables in order to distinguish homographs, as in η ("the") and ή ("or"); here the stress of the two words is the same.)
• In Spanish orthography, stress may be written explicitly with a single acute accent on a vowel. Stressed antepenultimate syllables are always written with this accent mark, as in árabe. If the last syllable is stressed, the accent mark is used if the word ends in the letters n, s, or a vowel, as in está. If the penultimate syllable is stressed, the accent is used if the word ends in any other letter, as in cárcel. That is, if a word is written without an accent mark, the stress is on the penult if the last letter is a vowel, n, or s, but on the final syllable if the word ends in any other letter. However as in Greek, the acute accent is also used for some words to distinguish various syntactical uses (e.g. té "tea" vs. te a form of the pronoun tú; dónde "where" as a pronoun or wh-complement, donde "where" as an adverb). For more information, see Stress in Spanish.
• In Portuguese, stress is sometimes indicated explicitly with an acute accent (for i, u, and open a, e, o), or circumflex (for close a, e, o). In diphthongs, when marked, the semivowel (or the semivowels) never receives the accent mark. Stress is not marked with diacritics when it can be otherwise predicted from spelling: it is marked only on uncommon pronunciation of pattern of letters.
• In Italian, the graphic accent is needed in words ending with an accented vowel, eg città, "city", and in some monosyllabic words which might otherwise be confused with other words, like là ("there") and la ("the"). It may (but by no means must) be written on any vowel when there is a possibility of misunderstanding, for instance condomìni ("condominiums") and condòmini ("joint owners"). See Italian alphabet: Diacritics.

In many languages, various typographical devices (such as italicization) may be used to place emphasis on particular words in written text; see Emphasis (typography). These can function to some extent as equivalents to or ways of representing the prosodic stress used to emphasize words while speaking.

Though not part of normal orthography, a number of devices exist that are used by linguists and others to indicate the position of stress (and syllabification in some cases) when it is desirable to do so. Some of these are listed here.

• In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), primary stress is indicated by a high vertical line before the syllable, secondary stress by a low vertical line. Example: [sɪˌlæbəfɪˈkeɪʃən] or /sɪˌlæbəfɪˈkeɪʃən/. Extra stress can be indicated by doubling the symbol: ˈˈ◌.
• Linguists frequently mark primary stress with an acute accent over the vowel, and secondary stress by a grave accent. Example: [sɪlæ̀bəfɪkéɪʃən] or /sɪlæ̀bəfɪkéɪʃən/. This has the advantage that it does not require a decision about syllable boundaries.
• In English dictionaries that show pronunciation by respelling, stress is typically marked with a prime mark placed after the stressed syllable: /si-lab′-ə-fi-kay′-shən/.
• In ad hoc pronunciation guides, stress is often indicated using a combination of bold text and capital letters. Example: si-lab-if-i-KAY-shun or si-LAB-if-i-KAY-shun
• In Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries, stress is indicated with an acute accent (´) on a syllable's vowel (example: вимовля́ння) or, in other editions, an apostrophe^[6] just after it (example: гла'сная). Stressing is rare in general texts, but is still used when necessary: compare за́мок (castle) and замо́к (lock).
• In Dutch, ad hoc indication of stress is usually marked by an acute accent on the vowel (or, in the case of a diphthong or double vowel, the first two vowels) of the stressed syllable. Compare achterúítgang (deterioration) and áchteruitgang (back exit).

See also

• Accent (poetry)
• Accent (music)
• Initial-stress-derived noun
• Foot (prosody)
• Rhythm

Notes

External links

• Feet and Metrical Stress (The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology)
• Word stress in English The six fundamental rules