Sentence Stress Flashcards
What does “rhythm” mean in English utterances?
Word and sentence stress combine and create a regular, patterned beat of stressed and unstressed syllables and pauses.
In English the length of an utterance depends on the number of what?
Number of stresses.
Which of content words and functions words usually carry stress in a sentence?
Content words.
What pattern of utterances (in relation to the length of utterances) does English follow?
Stress-timed pattern.
What happens to the length of the stresses in “CATS CHASE MICE” versus “The CATS will CHASE the MICE”? Because both sentences take the same amount of time to pronounce…
In the first sentence, there are less words, so the stresses are longer, as opposed to the second sentence which has more words (some of them unstressed) so length of stresses is shorter.
