IV. Информационный блок. Peculiarities of English Utterance - Stress

Peculiarities of English Utterance - Stress.

The peculiarity of the English language, from the point of view of utterance-stress, is the great number of functional words and their very high frequency in speech. The list of functional words that are generally unstressed in speech includes:

· articles, prepositions, conjunctions, some pronouns, auxiliary and modal verbs.

According to there pronunciation in an unstressed position it is possible to divide form-words into three main groups:

ü functional words, always weak in an unstressed position [1, p.82];

ü functional words (auxiliary and modal verbs, prepositions), which are reduced at the beginning or in the middle of an utterance, but retain their strong form at the end of it [1, p.83-84];

ü functional words, which retain there full forms in an unstressed positions, but very rapid colloquial speech [1, p. 84-85].

V. Учебно-методический блок.

1) Проработайте основные определения и понятия в данных рекомендациях, а также таблицу функциональных слов английского языка [1, с. 82-85].

2) Самостоятельно выполните тренировочные упражнения [1, с. 85-86].

Вопросы для самоконтроля.

What’s the peculiarity of the English language from the point of view of utterance-stress?

What English words are considered to be functional?

What is peculiar about the second group of functional words?

What English functional words are never reduced?