Appendix: Two Principles of Pronunciation Stress

English words are multisyllabic. For pronunciation, there exist two Principles of Stress.

(1) Principles of Word Stress, and

(2) Principles of Sentence Stress.

In other words, the pronunciation of an English word by itself as shown in dictionaries are different from its pronunciation in a sentence. According to (1) Principles of Word Stress, there are “stressed syllables” and “unstressed syllables” in a word. The difference between these two principles is the most common vowel sound “schwa”. It is a “reduced” vowel in many unstressed syllables in the following words:

· 'a', as in afraid

· 'e', as in spoken

· 'i', as in pencil

· 'o', as in memory

· 'u', as in supply

Take for example the following sentence:

“These are the good reasons for keeping the matter a secret.”

According to the Principles of Sentence Stress, from Clifford H. Prator, Jr. and Betty Wallace Robinett, Manual of American English Pronunciation, there are “stressed words” and “unstressed words”. The stressed words are the content words tabulated below:

The other class consists of the unstressed function words, which are also referred to as closed class words.

Reference: Clifford H. Prator, Jr. and Betty Wallace Robinett, Manual of American English Pronunciation, 4^th Ed., Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1985)

(c) 2019 Augustine C. Chen