Encyclopedia > Vocal stress

  Article Content

Vocal stress

In linguistics, vocal stress is the accent or emphasis given to each syllable in a piece of writing, as determined by conventional pronunciation. The amount and importance of vocal stress varies in languages. In some languages, vocal stress can determine the meaning of a word.

For example, in English, the word record changes its meaning according to vocal stress:

record, the noun
record, the verb

Poetry in English depends upon vocal stress to establish the meter of the poem. The vocal stress is usually thought of as strong or weak. Some people distinguish a third, intermediate stress level.

Example: In the word reconsider, the stress pattern is 'recon'sider (intermediate - weak - strong - weak).



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Class Warfare

... Barsamian[?]. It was first published in the UK by Pluto Press[?] in 1996. The contents runs as follows: Introduction Looking Ahead: Tenth Anniversary Interview ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 35.4 ms