Types and Degrees of Utterance-Stress. Peculiarities of English Utterance-Stress.

The actual semantic weight of individual words depends on the novelty of information and on the importance attached by the speaker to the particular element of information, both the aspects being determined by the communicative situation or the context. In other words, it is necessary to distinguish between types and degrees of utterance-stress. There is the position of nuclear and non-nuclear (pre-n or post-n) types of stress. Nuclear stress is the only obligatory stress in an intonation-group and signals the central point information. The specific structural features of nuclear stress are connected with its location in an intonation group:

Final pitch change: there are no other significant pitch changes following it;

Fixed position: in the absence of any disturbing contextual factors it falls on the last semantic item.

There are no strict limitations for the location of nuclear stress.

Nuclear stress can subdivided into full and partial.

The peculiarity of full stress is that it occurs only in the head of an intonation group.. partial stress occurs, besides the head, also in the prehead and toil.

Partial stresses can be high and low.

--High partial stress normally occurs in the head of rising or falling-rising tune while in the prehead it may be used but occasionally.

--Law partial stress is used in the tail after a falling or rising-falling nuclear tone and in the prehead, where it is indentified as such due to the pitch contrast with the onset syllable (the 1^st fully stressed syll. marking the beginning of the head).

Partial stress is generally given to notional words whose informative value is reduced either because they are repeated from a previous context or because they denote ideas of smaller importamce in comparison with the other words in the same utterance. Partially stressed monosyllabic words retain the full quality of the vowel.

A peculiarity of English is a great number of form-words and their very high frequency in speech. Form-words include articles, prepositions, conjunctions, some pronouns, auxiliary and modal verbs. They are usually unstressed. Monosyllabic form-words, when unstressed, most commonly have a weakened vowel. The use of a full quality vowel in this position leads to a foreign accent.

According to their pronunciation in an unstressed position, form-word can b divided into two groups.

The 1^st group includes functional words that are never used in their strong form in an unstressed position in an utterance. The strong form of these words is used when the word is said in isolation or with emphasis.

The 2^nd group includes auxiliary and modal verbs and prepositions which are reduced when unstressed at the beginning or in the middle of an utterance, but retain their strong form when unstressed at the end of an utterance.

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