Unit 2. Types and Degrees of Utterance-Stress

The actual semantic weight of the individual words acquiring prominence (stress) in an utterance is different. This difference depends 1) on the novelty of information and 2) on the importance of information.

It is necessary to discriminate between types and degrees of utterance-stress.

First of all, there is the opposition of n u c 1 e a r and non-nuclear (pre-nuclear or post-nuclear) types of stress.

From a functional point of view nuclear stress is the only obligatory stress in an intonation-group and signals the central point of information. The specific structural features of nuclear stress are connected with its location in an intonation-group:

1. it is normally associated with final pitch change, which means that there are no other significant (i.e. perceptible) pitch changes following it;

2. it occupies a relatively fixed position in an intonation-group: in the absence of any disturbing contextual factors it falls on the last semantic item.

In principle, any word in any utterance position can be made nucleus, provided it carries the most important information.

It should be noted in this connection that the location of the nuclear stress itself is not entirely semantic by nature, since the rhythmic tendency towards similarity of the accentual patterns of intonation-groups often appears to override the semantic factor in importance, particularly, when the last notional word is not the final word in an utterance and is followed by some function words. In such cases there is a high probability for the last of the function words (or the last but one) to acquire nuclear prominence and thus to maintain the typical structure of an intonation-group. Compare, e.g.:

'What are you ^\laughing at? or 'What are you 'laughing ^\ at ?

The word carrying the most important information may sometimes be situated in the middle or even at the beginning of an utterance. In such cases the notional words occurring in the post-nuclear part (tail) will have, as a rule, some kind of prominence and the last of them will become a secondary nucleus, bearing a Low Fall or a Low Rise (the latter forming the second element of a Fall-Rise Divided):

• 'Why not 'go to some ^\more places next _/week?

• But I 'really ^.ought to 'think about the ^\business _|side of my _/visit.

Non-nuclear stresses are subdivided into f u 11 and partial. This gradation reflects variations in the degree of prosodic prominence.

The peculiarity of full stress is that it occurs only in the head of an intonation-group while partial stress occurs also in the prehead and tail.

Partial stresses can be high (indicated ^.m) and low (indicated _|m).

High partial stress normally occurs in the head of an intonation-group and in the tail of a rising or falling-rising tune.

'Shall we ^.say /Saturday ^.night?

Low partial stress is used in the tail after a falling or rising-falling nuclear tone and in the prehead.

I _|heard you were 'thinking of ^.going a^\broad this _|summer.

It must be noted here that syllables carrying a low static tone in the head of an intonation-group should be regarded as fully stressed, although their prominence is weaker than that of a syllable with a high or mid static tone:

'Nobody ^.seems to have _|come to 'any con^\clusion.

Partial stress is generally given to notional words whose informative value is reduced, either because they are repeated from a previous context or because they denote ideas of smaller importance in comparison with the other words in the same utterance.