STRESS

Stress is an important feature of speech which creates special problems to many Nigeria speakers of English. In speech sound, there words that are ultered or produced with greater breath effort and muscular energy than the others. Such syllables with greater muscular energy are louder and longer and are therefore said to be stressed. Stress also involved the increase in pitch of the voice. In English, there are three (3) degree stress, namely:

  1. Primary stress
  2. Secondary stress
  • Unstressed words

Syllables with great muscular energy are refer to as “stressed” while those produced with less effort are “unstressed”

A stress syllable is indicated by placing stroke at the beginning of the syllable.

RULES GUIDING STRESS PATTERN

There is no rule guiding the stress pattern of word in English, but if a word consists of two syllable, the first syllable is prefix, the second syllable attract stress while the first syllable is unstressed. Examples:

HOstile                         ConTAIN

EAting                          PreTEND

PIllow                          UnKNOWN

NEver                          UnTILL

DOCtor                        reMAIN

HOStel                         exCEED

TAble                           beHIND

WINdow                      canTEEN

More examples on stress pattern. The meaning and the classes of the following words can also be affected by a change in stress pattern.

NOUN                                      VERB

OBject                                     obJECT

CONtest                                   conTEST

TRANSport                               transPORT

REbel                                       reBEL

CONtrast                                 conTRAST

PROtest                                   proTEST

EScort                                      esCORT

REcord                                      reCORD

IMport                                     imPORT

 

Assignment

Indicate the stressed syllable in each of the following words by writing it in capital letters. E.g. Subject (n) – SUBject

WORD                      STRESS SYLLABLE IN CAPITAL LETTER

Insult (n)

Suspect (v)

Desert (n)

Export (v)

Digest (v)

Project (n)

See also:

INFORMAL LETTER II

TECHNIQUES OF SPEED READING

Regular and Irregular Verbs

Intonation / Stress

COMPOSITION

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