Sentence Stress

Hello!

As I said in class today, we have to take a brief break from vowels to talk about word stress. We talked about words that carry meaning and words that are only necessary for grammar. Words that carry the meaning are called content words. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, negatives, wh- question words, numbers, etc.

Then we have the other words, the little words that are not as crucial to meaning. These we call structure words or function words. They are words like a, the, for, but, I, him, etc. These are the prepositions, articles, conjunctions, pronouns and so on.

To illustrate this, we looked at a telegram or text that you are sending to your friend in Detroit to ask that person to meet your aunt at the airport and interpret for her. We pretended that to send the telegram or text will cost us $5 per word. We really need to save money, so what can we take out?

After we edited the text message, we put the words we kept and the words we took out into two columns. These were our content words and structure words.

Next we talked about the rhythm and timing of English. Unlike French, Spanish, Romanian and Japanese, English is a stress-timed language. What on earth does that mean?

To answer that, we looked at the sentence "Wolves eat sheep." Each content word gets stress. each stressed word is like a beat in music. How many beats are there in that sentence? Yes, three. We clapped it out to get the rhythm.

Then I put in a function word: The wolves eat sheep. Now how many stressed words? Still three. You said it with me and we clapped. What happened? We still only clapped three times. Why? Because "the" does not get any stress. It is very short and soft.

What about when I added another "the?" The wolves eat the sheep. How many stressed beats? Still three. And it takes a native speaker the same amount of time to say this sentence as it does to say the first one. Wow, eh?

Then I changed the sentence to: "The wolves are eating the sheep." Now how long does it take me to say it? How many stressed syllables? It's the same. Three.

This is the key to the rhythm of English!

So now we looked at our new dialogue (still using the /ey/ sound) and practiced saying it with the correct sentence stress. Everyone did a very good job. You are starting to sound more natural every day. Knowing the music of English really helps others to understand you.