Stress and Unstress, in Words and Sentences in spoken English,
Is normative and contrastive. That is, there are, by most estimates, five or six regular regular degrees of stress of words in normally construed spoken English sentences, and three or four degrees of regular unstress--and the determination of which words these are, and how exactly, the manner in which, a speaker of English allots each of them their particular degree of stress or unstress is a usual, indeed a grammatical, function of the English language. First to be noted is that there is regular feature of English stress pattern which may be applied to any word, and which is to be understood as "normative extra-stress," which denotes (not X, but), as in the sentence,
Sheep may safely graze,
where the the primary stress (indicated by the italicization of the word sheep), which would ordinarily fall on the last word in the sentence "graze," is displaced to the word "sheep," implying that (not X, but) goats might not safely graze, (or might, instead, browse). In fact, every primary stress in spoken English is felt to a degree to be contrastive with every subsequent primary stress; thus it would be natural to say in English,
Sheep may safely graze.
Goats may safely browse.
The stress order of the words in both sentences is, of course: 2, 3, 4, 1.
posted by anatole at
1:10 PM
3 Comments:
Beautifully said, and something which I endeavour to follow each day when I read aloud to my beloved till she falls asleep. This often requires sight-reading the whole sentence in advance to avoid potential mistakes. When they do occur, i always repeat the phrase to give each word the correct relative weight.
Also, when watching a DVD, I always view it with subtitles. When they appear before the actor speaks, I often note that I might say the lines differently. (It's amusing that the subtitle-writer often makes mistakes too.
Hi again, Vincent.
You startle me. These ruminations of mine on the grammatical function of stress (and unstress) in spoken English, which is, I think, peculiar to English--or, at least, peculiar to English in its complexity--are among my inmost, most private thoughts; when I blog them I scarcely expect to be heard, or at all understood. I note that the science of linguistics largely ignores (as if it were beneath the consideration of serious grammarians) this aspect of spoken English, and that teachers of English as a second language (particularly for those whose first language is a tonal language, or a language like French which has no particularly significant pattern of stress/unstress), are constantly, and often unsuccessfully, scrambling to find the underlying system of spoken English stress/unstress patterns, and to make rational and meaningful sense of them. Well, thanks for understanding. If I ever finish my stress/unstress analysis of Paradise Lost I'll dedicate it to you.
Again--
Indeed as you suggest: the correct reading aloud of an English sentence requires knowing what the last word in the sentence is before you begin: For the reason that (with the exception of some deliberate, and meaningful, unstresses) in ordinary spoken English, the last word of a sentence receives the primary stress of the sentence. And yes, every sentence in spoken English has a primary stress (i.e., a word that receives primary stress).
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