Introducing Stress, Rhythm And Intonation

Introducing Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation
The sounds can be significantly affected by vocal features known as stress, rhythm, and intonation. Must be used correctly if you are to be completely understood.
Stress: speakers must stress certain syllables in words, stress can also change the meaning of the sentence.
Rhythm: is created by the strong stresses or beats in sentence. Syllables arerarely lost or reduced as they are in English. Reductions results because English has stress-timed rhythm, this means that its rhythm is determined by the number of stresses, not by the number of syllables.
Intonation: intonation patterns involve pitch and are responsible for the melody of the language. Speakers frequently depend more on intonation patterns to convey their meaning than on thepronunciation of the individual vowels and consonants.
Stress within the word
Definition: stress refers to the amount of volume that a speaker gives to a particular sound, syllable, or word while saying it. Stresses sounds and syllables are louder and longer that unstressed ones.
Stress in English: A major characteristic in English is the use of strong and weak stress. Accented syllables receivemore force and are louder that unaccented ones.
Words stressed on the first syllable:
* The majority of two-syllable words are accented on the first syllable.
* Compound nouns are accented on the first syllable
* Compound verbs are usually accented on the second or last syllable
Stress in noun/verb homographs: In these pairs, the noun will always be stressed on the first syllableand the verb on the second syllable.

Stress within the sentence
Possible pronunciation problems: In English, specific words within a sentence are emphasized or spoken louder to make them stand out. Using the stress patterns of your native language when speaking English, will contribute to your foreign accent.
If you place the stress on the wrong word you will:
* Completely change themeaning of your statement.
* Distort your intended meaning of the sentence
* If you give too much or equal stress to unimportant or “function words”.
Words generally stressed in a sentences: content words
Content words are the important words in a sentence that convey meaning. They include all the major parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and question words.
Wordsgenerally unstressed in sentences: Function words
Function words are the unimportant words in a sentence. We normally do not stress function words when speaking. Function words include the following parts of speech:
* Articles
* Prepositions
* Pronouns
* Conjunctions
* Helping verbs
Stressing words to clarify or change meaning
Sometimes a speaker wants to convey a specialmeaning that it wouldn’t have in written form. Can be done by stressing a specific word in order to call the attention to it.
Stress in adjective/ noun combinations
When you speak, its important to use words that describe what you are talking about. When you use adjective/noun combinations, the noun normally receives greater stress. By accidentally stressing the adjective, you might mistankenly saya compound noun with a completely different meaning.

Rhythm
The rhythm of conversational English is more rapid than that of formal speech. Effective use of rhythm will help you to achieve more natural-sounding speech.
Possible pronunciation problems
Using your language, syllables are rarely lost or reduced as they are in English. This habit will contribute to a noticeable foreign accent.* If you stress each word equally or too precisely
* If you avoid the use of contractions or reduced forms
* If you insert pauses incorrectly between the words of the sentence, you will distort the meaning of your sentence and create a choppy rhythm.
Contractions
Contractions are 2 words that are combined together to form one. If you use the full form of the contraction in...