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PEDAGOGICAL INSTITUTE OF TERMEZ STATE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Sentence stress: weak forms of articles, prepositions and connectors
Subject: Phonetics
Group: 101 mtb
Student: Nazarova Dinora
TERMEZ - 2022
Sentence stress: weak forms of articles, prepositions and connectors
Plan:
What is Sentence Stress
Weak forms of articles
Prepositions and Connectors
References
Sentence Stress
Sentence stress is the music of spoken English. Like word stress, sentence stress can help you to understand spoken English, even rapid spoken English.
Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm or "beat". You remember that word stress is accent on one syllable within a word. Sentence stress is accent on certain words within a sentence.
Most sentences have two basic types of word:
Content words are the key words of a sentence. They are the important words that carry the meaning or sense—the real content.
Structure words are not very important words. They are small, simple words that make the sentence correct grammatically. They give the sentence its correct form—its structure.
If you remove the structure words from a sentence, you will probably still understand the sentence.
If you remove the content words from a sentence, you will not understand the sentence. The sentence has no sense or meaning.
Sentence stress could be dealt with during clarification of language.
Let’s say you are helping students become more aware of how to use the present perfect to describe past experiences. After helping students notice the meaning of the structure, you can board a sample sentence and ask the group what syllables should receive more emphasis. It is also a good idea to provide visual reference by, for example, underlining the stronger syllables:
I’ve never been to China.
I’ve travelled to Poland twice this year.
If you want to spend more time helping learners notice how sentence stress is placed, you could carry out a discovery activity, using a scene from a film, course book audio or any other source of listening input. Take a look at the example below:
1) Ask students to look at the lyrics from the song Price Tag, by British singer Jessie J. For each line, they should underline the syllables that they expect to be stronger.
Seems like everybody's got a price (3 syllables)
I wonder how they sleep at night (3 Syllables)
When the sale comes first (2 syllables)
And the truth comes second (2 syllables)
Just stop for a minute and smile (3 syllables)
Why is everybody so serious? (3 syllables)
Acting so damn mysterious? (3 syllables)
Got shades on your eyes (2 syllables)
And your heels so high (2 Syllables)
that you can't even have a good time (3 syllables)
Grammatical words are words that help us construct the sentence but they don't mean anything: articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, etc.
Sometimes weak forms are easy to spot, because we use contractions in the spelling to show it:
I am French (strong form) I'm French (weak form)
But usually there is no change of spelling, only the pronunciation is different:
But strong form: /bʌt/ weak form: /bət/
Tell him to go strong forms /hɪm/ /tu:/ weak form: /tel əm tə gəʊ/
As you can see, the grammatical words "him" and "to" are unstressed and have a weak form when pronounced inside a sentence.
another example: I would like some fish and chips
strong forms /aɪ wʊd laɪk sʌm fɪʃ ænd tʃɪps/ This version sounds unnatural and, believe it or not, more difficult to understand for a native speaker.
weak forms /ɑ wəd laɪk səm fɪʃ ən tʃɪps/ and we can use weaker forms sometimes: /ɑd laɪk səm fɪʃ ən tʃɪps/ so we can see that the auxiliary verb "would" has two weak forms /wəd/ and /d/
Students who are learning English usually use only strong forms, and they sound very unnatural. English speakers use weak forms all the time, every single sentence is full of them, and students find it difficult to understand because they are not used to them, and very often they don't even know they exist.
It is very common to use strong form and weak form when speaking in English because English is a stress-time language. It means you stress on content words such as nouns and principal verbs, while structure words such as helping verbs, conjunctions, prepositions… are not stressed. Using proper strong form and weak form can help you to speak English more fluently.
For example, take a look at these sentences:
She can play violin.
Mary is from Chicago.
Here are these two sentences with stressed words in bold.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
