Introduction to Sentence Stress

Hello!

Over the past two weeks we have been learning to count syllables, identify the stressed syllable, and pronounce the schwa sound. We now know that the stressed syllable is longer, clearer, maybe a bit louder, and has a slightly higher pitch. Now we have a good foundation for the rhythm and music of English.

Today I told you that most of the languages of the world can be divided into two main categories. Spanish, French, Cantonese Chinese, and Romanian are syllable-timed languages. That means that a sentence with 12 syllables takes four times as long to say as a sentence with three syllables.

English, Arabic, Russian, Swedish and Mandarin Chinese are in a different category. Before telling you what we call that category, I had you play a little game. I gave you each a telegram that was too long, too expensive. Your job was to make it cheaper. Each word was $1 and we started with 28 words. I only had $13, so you had to eliminate 15 unnecessary words without losing the meaning.

After we finished cutting out the unnecessary words, we made two lists: words we kept and words we threw out. I told you that the words we kept are called content words. These are the words that carry meaning. The words we discarded are called function words or grammar words. You need them for good English, but you don't really need them for meaning.

We talk to animals and very small babies using content words. Think about these:

"Bad dog!"

"Stove hot!"

"Good girl!"

In the next activity, we practiced saying a short sentence: Cows eat grass. I asked you how many beats there are in this sentence. You said three. That's correct. And how many content words? Three.

Then we looked at "The cows eat grass." We counted the content words (still three). And we counted the big beats. It's still three, isn't it? We barely say the word "the." It gets squeezed in and almost sounds like part of the word cows, doesn't it? What about the vowel sound in "the?" You're right; it's schwa!

We kept adding more and more function words to the sentence, but we still only had three big beats when we said it! It takes the same amount of time to say "The cows will have eaten the grass" as it takes to say "Cows eat grass." Isn't that amazing?

English is a stress-timed language.

In the next activity, we practiced saying some sentences. We drummed on our desks and tried to keep the same time between content words. "Dogs chase cats." "A dog has chased the cat." Each of those sentences should take the same amount of time for you to say. They have three big beats.

We then talked about the parts of speech that we usually stress in English and the parts of speech that we usually don't stress. I gave you a handout with the lists. We usually stress nouns, main verbs, adjectives, numbers, question words, negatives, helping verbs when they are alone (e.g., "Yes, I am."), etc. We quickly came up with examples for each category.

Finally we looked at some sentences and underlined the words that get the stress (all the content words). We took turns saying those sentences while stressing the content words.

Good work! See you Tuesday in the lab!