Stress or accent

Stress

Stress or accent is relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence.

This emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch.

The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress or lexical stress.

Some languages have fixed stress, meaning that the stress on virtually any multisyllable word falls on a particular syllable , such as the first or the penultimate.  

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

• Lexical stress, or word stress, is the stress placed on a given syllable in a word.

Languages in which 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 Armenian the stress is on the last syllable of a word.

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.

In English, it is not fully predictable: 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.

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 the placing of emphasis on particular words because of their relative importance (contrastive stress).

Thank you for attention