Study of english stress and intonation

TIMING:

English is a stress-timed language; that is, stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this.

English does this to some extent with noun-verb pairs such as a récord vs. to recórd, where the verb is stressed on the last syllable and the related noun is stressed on the first; record also hyphenates differently: a réc.ord vs. to re.córd.
PLACEMENT:

INTONATION:

In linguistics, intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody. Intonation is the "music" of a language, and is perhaps the most important element of a good accent. Often we hear someone speaking with perfect grammar, and perfect formation of the sounds of English but with a little something that gives them away as not being a native speaker. Intonation – the rise and fall of pitch in our voices – plays a crucial role in how we express meaning.

Intonation contours in English

Not all rises and falls in pitch that occur in the course of an English phrase can be attributed to stress. The same set of segments and word stresses can occur with a number of pitch patterns. Consider the difference between:

• You're going. (statement)
• You're going? (question)

The rise and fall of pitch throughout is called its intonation contour.

English has a number of intonation patterns which add conventionalized meanings to the utterance: question, statement, surprise, disbelief, sarcasm, teasing.

English has a number of intonation patterns which add conventionalized meanings to the utterance: question, statement, surprise, disbelief, sarcasm, teasing.

An important feature of English intonation is the use of an intonational accent (and extra stress) to mark the focus of a sentence. Normally this focus accent goes on the last major word of the sentence, but it can come earlier in order to emphasize one of the earlier words or to contrast it with something else.