Word stress

Word stress is one of the ways that help us understand spoken English very quickly. Native speakers do not find it difficult to use the word stress. They consider it so natural that they do not even remember whether they are using it or not. Non-native speakers who do not use word stress face problems while speaking to native speakers. 

One of those problems is that they barely understand native speakers speaking fast. Another problem is that a native speaker can also barely understand English. 

In this lesson, we will learn about word stress, its importance, and rules that help us understand word stress. 

Getting familiar with syllables 

To maintain the beat in spoken English, we use a part of pronunciation that has one vowel or one vowel sound, sometimes followed by a consonant called syllables. A syllable can be part of the word consisting of two or more letters or a complete word. A word can have one syllable, two or more syllables. 

Example:

• The word bat has one syllable in it. 
• The word music has two syllables in it. 
• There are three syllables in the elephant. 

To understand the phenomena of word stress, we need to understand syllables first. 

 What is the word stress?

As you learned now that there are one or more than one syllables in a word, so when it comes to pronouncing such words, we do not say out loud all of the syllables at a time. Instead, we emphasize one of the syllables and say it loudly, and the rest of the syllables silently. To stress on the correct syllable in each word is called word stress. 

Example: 

Let us assume that we have three words 

1. Photographer 
2. Photographic 
3. Photograph 

Now let’s see how many syllables each word has.

So, the number of syllables varies in almost every word. When we say all of these words, they indeed do not sound the same because each time we say the word, we stress the one and different syllable. 

Note: The stressed syllable is denoted by Capital letters. 

1. PHO-to-graph. 

This word has three syllables, and we stress one the first one. 

1. Pho-TO-graph-er 

This word has four syllables, and we emphasize the second. 

1. Pho-to-GRAPH-ic 

This word has four syllables, and we stress the third one. 

Now you must be thinking about how stress one each word varies from the other. Right? So at this level, you must understand that we do not stress the same syllable in every word. 

Now let us reveal the magic key to help you understand the stressed syllable in each word. 

But before that, you need to remember two important things. 

• One word can only have one stress. There isn’t any word in English which have two stress. If you hear two stress, that means that there are two words, not one. 
• We always stress the vowel, not consonants. 

Word stress rules 

As you learned that word stress varies from one word to the other. So, there are a few rules that help you understand word stress phenomena and help you in pronunciation. There are four-word stress rules that you need to keep in mind whenever you speak. Once you are familiar with the rules, you can quickly identify the syllables from the word's music or rhythm. 

1. Stress the last syllable of verbs

The first rule of word stress says that we stress the second syllable in 99 % of the two-syllable English verbs. 

Example: 

2. Stress on the first syllable of 2 syllable nouns and adjectives 

The second rule is about two-syllable nouns and adjectives. In adjectives and nouns, we stress the first syllable of the word, which completely changes the word's pronunciation. 

Example: 

3. Stress on penultimate syllables 

The word penultimate means second from the last or the second last. Whenever we have a penultimate syllable, we stress the second-last syllable. Such words include: 

a) Words ending in -ic 

b) Words ending in -sion and -tion 

4. Stress on anti-penultimate syllables 

Anti-penultimate syllables are those that are in the third position from the last. We stress anti-penultimate syllables whenever the words end in -cy, -ty, phy, and -gy.

5. Stress on the compound nouns

Compound words have two words. When it comes to compound nouns, we stress the first part.

In compound adjectives, the stress is on the second part. 

In compound verbs, the word stress is also on the second part, like compound adjectives.

Conclusion:

Now you know that you have to stress the specific syllable in a word. whenever you stress on the syllable, you have to produce a longer vowel and raise the syllable pitch. 

Word stress is an integral part of the language. If you want to be a fluent English speaker, you have to use word stress to communicate rapidly and fluently like native speakers.