Essay On Stress In English

One of the most prominent characteristics of English is the way it alters stressed sounds with unstressed sounds as English is a stress-timed language. Contrary to French, English is a language that puts stress on certain syllables of each word – a stressed syllable is a syllable pronounced with more strength than the other syllables of the word.

The difficulty of English lies in the fact that stress rules are very large and contain a lot of exceptions, as opposed to Spanish, in which the rules are strict and the few exceptions are written with a diacritical accent. Take the word árbol for instance; if we follow the rule the stress is supposed to be on the second syllable, but as this word is an exception, the stress is actually on the first

It is performed naturally by native English speakers, but it is very challenging to pinpoint by French speakers learning English (in French, we tend to pronounce each syllable the same way and put a light stress on the last syllable of the word). It is also different from Spanish in which, even though stress syllables exist, other syllables are not reduced.

In unstressed syllables long vowel sounds such as /a:/, /u:/, /e:/, /i:/and /o:/ are reduced and replaced by short vowel sounds like /I/,/ʊ/ or /ə/ also called schwa. The schwa /ə/ is the most common short vowel used when vowel reduction happens. For instance, in the word democracy /dɪˈmɒkrəsɪ/ the stress is on the second syllable, other syllables are unstressed and the vowels are reduced with short vowel sounds. The same goes for the word electoral /ɪˈlɛktərəl/.

The short vowels /I/and /ʊ/ in unstressed syllables are always followed by a consonant like in the words politic /ˈpɒlɪtɪk/ and executive /ɪɡˈzɛkjʊtɪv/ for example. The schwa can either be found followed by a consonant (electoral /ɪˈlɛktərəl/) or at the end of a word (paper /ˈpeɪpə/), it is then called the r-colored