Phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet

Prosodic stress
Prosodic stress is extra stress given to words or syllables when they appear in certain
positions in an utterance, or when they receive special emphasis.
According to Ladefoged's analysis (as referred to under 
Lexical stress § Notes
above),
English normally has prosodic stress on the final stressed syllable in an 
intonation unit
. This
is said to be the origin of the distinction traditionally made at the lexical level between
primary and secondary stress: when a word like admiration (traditionally transcribed as
something like /ˌædmɪˈreɪʃən/) is spoken in isolation, or at the end of a sentence, the syllable
ra (the final stressed syllable) is pronounced with greater force than the syllable ad, although
when the word is not pronounced with this final intonation there may be no difference
between the levels of stress of these two syllables.
Prosodic stress can shift for various 
pragmatic
functions, such as focus or contrast. For
instance, in the dialogue Is it brunch tomorrow? No, it's dinner tomorrow, the extra stress shifts
from the last stressed syllable of the sentence, tomorrow, to the last stressed syllable of the
emphasized word, dinner.
Grammatical 
function words
 are usually prosodically unstressed, although they can acquire
stress when emphasized (as in Did you find the cat? Well, I found a cat). Many English function
words have distinct strong and weak pronunciations; for example, the word a in the last
example is pronounced /eɪ/, while the more common unstressed a is pronounced /ə/. See
Weak and strong forms in English
.
Rhythm
English is claimed to be a 
stress-timed
language. That is, stressed syllables tend to appear
with a more or less regular rhythm, while non-stressed syllables are shortened to
accommodate this. For example, in the sentence One make of car is better than another, the
syllables one, make, car, bett- and -noth- will be stressed and relatively long, while the other
syllables will be considerably shorter. The theory of stress-timing predicts that each of the
three unstressed syllables in between bett- and -noth- will be shorter than the syllable of
between make and car, because three syllables must fit into the same amount of time as that
available for of. However, it should not be assumed that all varieties of English are stress-
timed in this way. The English spoken in the West Indies,
[93]
 in Africa
[94]
 and in India
[95]
are
probably better characterized as 
syllable-timed
, though the lack of an agreed scientific test
for categorizing an accent or language as stress-timed or syllable-timed may lead one to
doubt the value of such a characterization.
[96]

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