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Word stress, or sometimes lexical stress, is the stress placed on a given syllable in a word. The position of word stress in a word may depend on certain general rules applicable in the language or dialect in question, but in other languages, it must be learned for each word, as it is largely unpredictable, for example in English .
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis. According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under § Lexical stress above), English normally has prosodic stress on the final stressed syllable in an intonation unit.
Stress functions as the means of making a syllable prominent. Stress may be studied in relation to individual words (named "word stress" or lexical stress) or in relation to larger units of speech (traditionally referred to as "sentence stress" but more appropriately named "prosodic stress"). Stressed syllables are made prominent by several ...
In ongoing speech, the lexical stress patterns can be affected by the neighboring words and by syntactic and semantic structures. For example, green house and greenhouse differ in that the second word loses stress in the latter, and generally this type of semantic combination exhibits this prosodic pattern. There are many ways that prosody ...
Some major successor theories include autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky and Halle represent speech sounds as bundles of plus-or-minus valued features (e.g. vocalic, high, back, anterior, nasal, etc.) The phonological component of each lexical entry is considered to be a linear sequence of these feature ...
Languages that use lexical pitch accents are described as pitch accent languages, in contrast to tone/tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese and Yoruba. Pitch accent languages differ from tone languages in that pitch accents are assigned to only one syllable in a word, but tones can be assigned to multiple syllables in a word.
Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix .) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English ...