Sentence-stress in English

Sentence stress is the governing (руководящий) stress in connected speech. All words have their individual stress in isolation. When words are connected into thought groups, and thought groups into sentences, content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) keep their stress and function words (служебные) lose their stress.

The most important words in a sentence receive stronger stress. The last stressed word in a sentence receives the strongest stress with the help of falling or rising intonation. If it is necessary to keep the rhythm, the stress in some words can be shifted or weakened in a certain way.

Sentence stress has a very important function OF MARKING THE WORDS that are necessary for understanding an utterance. When native speakers of English listen to their conversation partners, they listen for stressed words, because stressed words provide important information.

It is often difficult to understand the meaning of the sentence in which even one content word is missing. It is also difficult to understand the sentence in which an important word is not stressed or a function word is stressed.

Unstressed function words make sentences grammatically correct. They are not important in terms of the information, because even if you don’t get some quickly pronounced function words, the meaning of the whole sentence will be clear to you.

Sentence stress is THE MAIN MEANS OF PROVIDING RHYTHM IN SPEECH. Rhythm is the key to fluent English speech. The stressed syllables are like the beats of the metronome: regular, loud, and clear. The unstressed syllables between the beats are shortened, obscured and joined together.

Sentence stress is the key component of English intonation. Intonation organizes words into sentences, distinguishes between different types of sentences and adds emotional coloring to utterances.