PRONUNCIATION-Sentence Stress
A sentence may consist of words having only one syllable (monosyllabic) and words having more than one syllable (polysyllabic). The words having more than one syllable need to be stressed in a more or less fixed way and we cannot take much liberty with them. However, the words in a sentence with only one syllable may or may not be stressed, depending on their importance. For instance, in a sentence like, How could you say such a big lie? All the words have only one syllable. You might put the stress on how, all, big, lie, depending on which of the words you consider important for expressing your intended meaning. Such stressing of monosyllabic words and particularly syllables of polysyllabic words together produce the phenomenon that is called sentence stress.
It may be noted that English sentences are uttered in a rhythmic way and word stress and sentence
stress help a speaker of English to speak English rhythmically. Please note in connection with sentence stress that-
Function words (personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, verb' be'
together with its different forms) are generally not stressed in a sentence unless you have a special
meaning in mind as in the example before. For example, in the sentence you may utter the sentence
"How could you say such a big lie?" with stress on "you" as well if you want to emphasize it.
Content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs (except 'be'), demonstratives, question words, yes /no/not)
are generally stressed. But again it is not obligatory. Depending on the meaning a monosyllabic content word may remain unstressed in a sentence. For instance you may not choose to stress tell in the above sentence, particularly if you choose to stress the word you
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