STRESS IN CONNECTED SPEECH

STRESS IN CONNECTED SPEECH

Given the fact that English sentences have both stressed and unstressed words,
we ask ourselves the question: ‘How do we know which words we have to
stress in a sentence?’ To answer this question, let us start by looking at the
following message in a telegram:

SEND BOOKS SPEED POST

The message can be understood even though it is not a complete grammatical
sentence. This is so because the words used in it carry the information the
sender wishes to convey. All such words that carry information and are
important for meaning are generally ‘content’ words. Now, what sort of
words are content words? They are: nouns, main verbs (except the verb ‘to
be’) adjectives, adverbs, demonstratives, question-words (what, where, when,
who, why, how, etc.) and the words yes, no and not.

 In order to expand this telegraphic message into a complete grammatical
sentence we can add other words which are generally structure words. These
are personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions,
and ‘to be’ verbs (am, is, are was, were). Thus the expanded message would
be ‘Could you send me the books by Speed Post?’ Since these structure words
do not carry information or convey meaning, they are generally unstressed or
weak, whereas content words, which do convey meaning, are generally
stressed.