Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

2. What are Stress Patterns?

Before we can delve into the field of stress patterns in English and Czech, it is first important to define what stress patterns and stress itself actually are. By Kingdon’s (1958) definition, stress is “the relative degree of force used by a speaker on the various syllables he is uttering. It gives a certain basic prominence to the syllables, and hence to the words, on which it is used, and incidentally assists in avoiding monotony.” (p. 1) We differentiate two types of stress: word stress and sentence stress. Word stress, as the name suggests, is the placement of stress on certain syllables within a given word. Some words have no word stress (mostly in the case of monosyllabic words) while others have multiple stresses, with varying degrees of strength. Sentence stress on the other hand is the placement of stress on certain words within a sentence. It does not necessarily have to coincide with word stress; indeed some monosyllabic words may bear sentence stress if they are sufficiently important within the sentence while some words with multiple syllables may be unstressed if they are quite unimportant within the context of the sentence. Sentence stress mostly denotes emphasis and importance: new or more important information within a sentence will generally bear stronger stress than information that has already been mentioned in a previous sentence.
Stress itself comes naturally with speech. Native speakers acquire stress placement habits during childhood, as it is one of the basic features of any given language. Small children already have such mastery of correct stress placement that they can shift the sentence stress from one word to another in order to emphasize what they are trying to say. In sentence “I want that cake,” an extremely desperate or demanding child will most likely strongly emphasize the word “want” within the sentence to signify how powerful the urge to acquire the abovementioned pastry really is. Since stress is such a natural feature of speech, acquired in the first years of one’s life, it comes as very unnatural and confusing to a native speaker to hear someone misplace stress when speaking the language. Stress is just as basic a feature of speech as correct pronunciation, pauses, intonation etc. and can therefore greatly hinder one’s ability to be understood. Kingdon (1958) illustrates this perfectly on the case of a German-speaking student who, due to incorrect stressing, repeatedly received a train ticket to Kensington even though he wanted to buy one to Camden Town (p. xi). In this case, the student incorrectly pronounced the place name as single stressed, thus reducing the prominence of the word Town sufficiently for the hearer to perceive it as –ton.