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Linguistics

Notes common). We can look on stressed syllables as occurring against a “background” of these weak
syllables, so that their prominence is increased by contrast with these background qualities.
Prominence, then, is produced by four main factors: (1) loudness (2) length, (3) pitch and (4) quality.
Generally these four factors work together in combination, although syllables may sometimes be
made prominent by means of only one or two of them. Experimental work has shown that these
factors are not equally important; the strongest effect is produced by pitch, and length is also a
powerful factor. Loudness and quality have much less effect.
12.11 Levels of Stress

Up to this point we have talked about stress as though there were a simple distinction between
“stressed” and “unstressed” syllables with no intermediate levels; such a treatment would be a
two-level analysis of stress. Usually, however, we have to recognise one or more intermediate levels.
It should be remembered that in this chapter we are dealing only with stress within the word. This
means that we are looking at words as they are said in isolation, which is a rather artificial situation:
we do not often say words in isolation, except for a few such as ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘possibly’, ‘please’ and
interrogative words such as ‘what’, ‘who’, etc. However, looking at words in isolation does help us
to see stress placement and stress levels more clearly than studying them in the context of continuous
speech.
Let us begin by looking at the word ‘around’ ra nd, where the stress always falls clearly on the
e
last syllable and the first syllable is weak. From the point of view of stress, the most important fact
about the way we pronounce this word is that on the second syllable the pitch of the voice does not
remain level, but usually falls from a higher to a lower pitch. We can diagram the pitch movement
as shown below, where the two parallel lines represent the speaker’s highest and lowest pitch
level. The prominence that results from this pitch movement, or tone, gives the strongest types of
stress; this is called primary stress.
In some words, we can observe a type of stress that is weaker tha primary stress but stronger than
that of the first syllable of ‘around’; for example, consider the first syllables of the words
‘photographic’ f e t græfIk, ‘anthropology’ ,ænθr p Z l d3i. The stress in these words is called
secondary stress. It is usually represented in transcription with a low mark (,) so that the examples
e
e
e
could be transcribed as, f e t græfIk, ,ænθr p Z l d3i.
e
e
e
We have now identified two levels of stress; primary and secondary; this also implies a third level
which can be called unstressed and is regarded as being the absence of any recognisable amount of
prominence. These are the three levels that we will use in describing English stress. However, it is
worth noting that unstressed syllables containing , I, i, u, or a syllabic consonant, will sound less
prominent than an unstressed syllable containing some other vowel. For example, the first syllable
e
of ‘poetic’ p e 'etIk is more prominent that the first syllable of ‘pathetic’ p 'θetIk. This could be
used as a basis for a further division of stress levels, giving us a third (“tertiary”) level. It is also
e
possible to suggest a tertiary level of stress in some polysyllabic words. To take an example, it has
been suggested that the word ‘indivisibility’ shows four different levels: the syllable bIl is the
strongest (carrying primary stress), the initial syllable In has secondary stress, while the third syllable
vIz has a level of stress which is weaker than those two but stronger than the sdcond, fourth, sixth
and seventh syllable (which are all unstressed). Using the symbol to mark this tertiary stress, the
o
word could be represented like this: ,IndI vIz 'bIl ti. While this may be a phonetically correct
o e e
account of some pronunciations, the introduction of tertiary stress seems to introduce an unnecessary
degree of complexity. We will transcribe the word as,IndI, vIz 'bIl ti.
e
e
12.12 Placement of Stress within the Word
We now come to a question that causes a great deal of difficulty, particularly to foreign learners
(who cannot simply dismiss it as an academic question): how can one select the correct syllables to

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