Do you know how to stress words and phrases in English? Shadowing native speakers' speech is not enough to learn this skill, because the same sentence can be stressed in different ways to convey different meanings. To shadow effectively, you first need to understand the different types of stress in English, which in linguistics is called prosody. You may have learned about word stress and compound word stress, but English also has higher-level stresses, such as sentence stress and focus word stress. These higher-level stresses provide rhythm and melody to English speech. Without understanding these different types of stress and their intended meanings, shadowing is just parroting and you will likely be misunderstood. To be able to speak English that is easy on the ear because it is close to the native tune, you must study English prosody.
This course will teach you everything you need to know about English prosody, including word stress, compound word stress, sentence stress, and focus words stress. You'll also learn how to use these different types of stress to convey different meanings, such as literal meanings, emotional meanings, attitudinal meanings, and contextual meanings.
By the end of this course, you'll be able to speak English with confidence and clarity, and you'll be able to communicate your ideas more effectively.
Lecture title and length
Detailed Prosody Course Syllabus
Introduction to Prosody
English as a stressed-timed and intonational language
Prosodic hierarchy of English
Word stress
Syllable counting
Syllable based on the single vowel sound
Caution: adjacent vowel letters
Caution: affixes and compounds
Long vs short vowels
Syllabic consonants
Stressed syllables
Monosyllabic word stress
Two-syllable word stress
Three-syllable word stress
More-than-three syllable word stress
Stress shift due to affixes
Stress-neutral suffixes
Stress-shifting suffixes
Stress carrying suffixes
Stress with prefixes
Stress shift in words
Literal vs derived meaning
Different parts of speech
Compound word stress
Phrasal verb stress
Single-stressed phrasal verbs
Double-stressed phrasal verbs
Separable phrasal verb stress
Rhythmic stress shift
Three-part phrasal verb stress
Compound noun stress
Descriptive noun phrase stress
Stress based on the components of compound nouns
Compound vs descriptive noun phrases
Compound adjectives
Stress with hyphenated compound adjectives
Stress based on the components of compound adjectives
Stress of more than two word compound adjectives
Rhythmic stress shift
Sentence stress
Stress-timed vs syllable -timed language
Sentence stress
Content words vs function words
Priority of nouns
Unstressed content words
Stressed function words
Rhythm unit
The poetic foot
Isochrony
Grouping into rhythm units
Manners of creating rhythm
Rhythmic stress deletion
Rhythmic stress shift
Rhythmic vowel clipping
Vowel reduction
Syllable elision
Phoneme dropping in function words
Syllabic consonants
Contractions
Focus word stress
Thought group (intonation unit)
Pausing and change of meaning
Thought grouping
Pausing necessary
Restrictive vs nonrestrictive modifiers
Focus word
Focus word and change of meanings
Default place for focus word
Default focus words
Reasons for non-default focus words
Pitch contour
Nuclear syllable of focus word and tonic stress
Pitch contour
Elements of thought group: pre-head, head and tail
Intonation
Intonation vs tone language
Sentence intonation patterns
Terminal tone
Combining intonation units
Falling intonation
Rising intonation
Four pitch levels
Beginning pitch level
Sarcasm
Yes-no question
Rhetorical questions
Mid fall
Conversational implicatures
Steep fall
Parenthetical remarks
American vs British intonation
Intonation and its function
Grammar function
Attitude function
Context function
New vs old information
High vs low content