English Pronunciation for Icelanders

39
3 1
3 SENTENCE STRESS AND WEAK FORMS
3.1 Placement of sentence stress.
Check out the following sentence:
The river ran for three miles along the valley floor
Notice how some syllables are stressed (I’ve shown them
underlined) and other unstressed. We show stressed
syllables with the stress mark 1 in front of them. Listen
again.
The 1river 1ran for 1three 1miles a1long the 1valley 1floor
Notice how all the UNstressed syllables in this sentence
have weak vowels (0, i^, u¨), while the STRESSED
syllables have strong vowels (you may need to refresh your
memory on weak vowels, section 1.5 above).
ð0 1ri v0 1ræn f0 1þrI 1mailz 01lo~ ð0 1væ l^ 1flO
ð0 v0 f0 0 ð0 l^
Notice too how the stressed syllables sound as if they
occur at fairly regular intervals, however many unstressed
syllables (or no unstressed syllables) they have between
them. For instance, if we replace the the monosyllable
‘miles’ with the four-syllable word ‘kilometres’, the
pattern of the sentence hardly changes:
ð0 riv0 ræn f0 þrI mailz 0 lo~ ð0 væl^ flO
ð0 riv0 ræn f0 þrI ki lomit0z 0 lo~ ð0 væl^ flO
Remember the rules for the placement of sentence stress.
Stresses occur -
1 on all lexical terms including lexical verbs:
1riv0 1ræn 1mailz ki1lomit0z 1fAst 1sl0ul^
2 on negative words: 1not 1hæzNt 1w0unt 1nev0
3 on question words: 1hU 1wai 1wen
4 on demonstrative pronouns: 1ðis iz ð0 1pleis
1ðæts ð0 1mæn
5 on numbers: 1faiv 1sevN 1fEst 1sek0nd
6 on polysyllables: 01lo~ 01baut bi1twIn ð0m1selvz
All other words in the sentence, the monosyllabic
structural words, are usually unstressed.