Contrasted Stress

Teacher: Welcome to daily tips on learning English. Today's tip is on contrasted stress.

Teacher: If you listen to previous daily tips, you'll recall that content words such as nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are normally stressed. And function words such as personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and prepositions are normally not stressed.

Teacher: However, there are exceptions to this rule. The exceptions do conform to the universal rule for word stress. Namely you should stress the words that are important in the context. Let's look at some examples, the sentence I put your pen in my desk would normally have the words put, pen, and desk stressed. But if the listener didn't hear me clearly and start looking for his pen on my desk, I wound change the stress to the word in. I would say no, I put your pen in my desk not on my desk. The information convey by the preposition in has now become the most important word, and so receives the greatest stress.

Teacher: So now he looks in my desk and finds a pen , but he says, "This isn't my pen, this is your pen." Although the possessive adjective your and my are not normally stressed. Here they are very important to conveying a message, and so they received the greatest stress.

Teacher: Let's look at another example, two people are ordering in a restaurant. One says, "I'll have a ham and cheese sandwich and a small bowl of soup." And then the other says "I'll have a ham and egg sandwich and a large bowl of soup." Did you notice how the second person who ordered stress the words egg and large. That is because those words were different front what came before. This is called contrasted stress.

Teacher: Today's daily tip is to make sure to stress the most important words in your speech. Tune in tomorrow for another daily tip.