FUNCTIONS OF STRESS IN ENGLISH
Keywords:
English stress, prosodic function, lexical distinction, morphological structure, sentence stress, information structure, contrastive emphasis, rhythm and timing, pragmatic meaning, speech perception, intelligibility.Abstract
This paper undertakes an examination of the pervasive and varied functions of stress within the English language, positing it as a cardinal prosodic phenomenon that exerts influence across lexical, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic domains of interpretation. Stress operates as a phonemic determinant, differentiating lexical items with identical segmental compositions, and contributes to morphological transparency, syntactic parsing, and semantic disambiguation. Moreover, it serves to organize information structure through the signaling of focus, contrast, and discourse relevance. From a communicative perspective, stress augments intelligibility, facilitates speech perception, and shapes the rhythmic cadence characteristic of stress-timed linguistic systems. A comprehensive appreciation of stress's functional repertoire is deemed essential for the advancement of linguistic theory and for the efficacy of language pedagogy, particularly in the realm of second-language acquisition.
