Stress and Intonation Information
Welcome to your pronunciation website. Here you will be able to learn about stress placement and intonation patterns that, when practiced, will help you to achieve a more native like speaking ability.
Before we begin this section let�s first read a bit of history about the English language.
Historical Information
The English language that we know today has derived from a diverse history, historical events, religion, and educational sources. In our more recent history, English has borrowed words from Native American and Spanish speaking cultures. While establishing trade, foreign words were added to the English vocabulary base from countries as far away as Asia and South America. Many words have kept their original stress placement and intonation patterns while others have assimilated into English. As time marched on, many of the words took on changes in spelling and pronunciation. Often native speakers are not aware that words used in daily communication are other than English in origin. English is truly a �melting pot� language. This commingling of languages from different cultures of the world contributes to the difficulty of learning English pronunciation.
Continue on now to learn some very simple stress placement and intonation pattern information. When your finished with this section and you are feeling comfortable with what you have learned go on to the next section, which contains two different dialogs that you can practice with your tutor or a friend.
Stress and Stress Placement
The word stress means �loudness.� English has four levels of stress placement. Here we will indicate each level by a dot that will be sized in proportion to the level it is representing:
Weak (quiet)
Tertiary (loud)
Secondary (louder)
Primary (loudest)
Remember that changing the stress placement can change the meaning of the word.
There are many stress patterns in English. The five most common are:
Yes window below
No teacher arrive
together
behavior
bicycle
usual