Teach english new edition r

4
t % ^ a r m
7
n 'h « j^ (sentence) 
Ltls. 
warm in Ja^rp? (question)
As you read the question, you probably hear the 
stress 
on the word ‘warm ’, e.g. ‘It’s WARM 
in here?’ (where the speaker sounds as if he or she is contesting this description of the 
tem perature). It is on this stressed syllable that the speaker’s pitch changes. But if we move 
the stress to the first syllable o f the word ‘here’, e.g. ‘It’s warm in HERE?’ the question is now 
an exclamation or challenge to the notion that this room or place is warm - rather than 
questioning the w arm th itself.
Words of more than one syllable have both stressed and unstressed syllables (we say 
‘photographer’ not ‘^photographer’). Frequently, the stress is different when the word acts 
as different parts of speech, e.g. ‘im port’ (verb) but ‘im port’ (noun).
Teachers use a variety of symbols to show stress, e.g.
□ □ □ 
• •
•
'teacher 
performance 
rapport 
engagem ent
O ur sentence works, too, because the speaker has used a collection o f sounds - or 
phonemes
- to get the meaning across. For example, the word ‘warm ’, though it has four letters, has 
only three sounds, /w/, /o:/ (like ‘or’) and 
/m l.
Just by changing one sound (e.g. saying /n/ 
instead of /m/) we can change the word so that now o u r speaker, perhaps referring to the 
carpet, is saying ‘It’s worn in here’.
The fact that ‘warm ’ has four letters, but only three sounds (in British English) is a 
dem onstration of the fact that there is no one-to-one correspondence between sounds 
and spelling. Thus, for example, the ‘c’ of ‘cat’ is pronounced differently from the ‘c’ of 
‘cease’, but is the same as the ‘c’ of ‘coffee’. ‘Though’, ‘trough’ and ‘rough’ all have the letter 
com bination ‘ou’, but it is pronounced differently in every case. Different spellings can have 
the same sound, too: ‘plane’ and ‘gain’ both have the same vowel sound, but they are spelt 
differently.
There are two main categories of sounds: