Secondary stress | |
---|---|
ˌ◌ | |
IPA Number | 502 |
Encoding | |
Entity (decimal) | ˌ |
Unicode (hex) | U+02CC |
Secondary stress (or obsolete: secondary accent) is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called primary. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the -nun- in proˌnunciˈation (the higher vertical line denotes primary stress). Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress, respectively: pronùnciátion.[ citation needed ]
Most languages have at most one degree of stress on the phonemic level (English can contrast up to four levels of stress, that is, three degrees of stressed and one unstressed, according to some analyses [1] ). That is, each syllable has stress or it does not. Many languages have rhythmic stress; location of the stress may not be predictable, but when the location of one stressed syllable (which may be the primary stress) is known, certain syllables before or after can be predicted to also be stressed; these may have secondary stress. An example is Dutch, where the rule is that initial and final syllables (word boundaries) take secondary stress, then every alternate syllable before and after the primary stress, as long as two stressed syllables are not adjacent and stress does not fall on /ə/ (there are, however, some exceptions to this rule). See Dutch phonology § Stress. A similar rule applies in Romanian: secondary stress falls on every alternate syllable, starting with the first, as long as it does not fall adjacent to the primary stress. [2] In other languages (including Egyptian Radio Arabic,[ clarification needed ] Bhojpuri, Cayuga, Estonian, Hawaiian, Kaure, Malayalam, and Warrgamay), [3] secondary stress can be predicted to fall on heavy syllables.
In other languages, the placement of secondary stress is not predictable, or may not be predictable (and thus be phonemic) for some words. This is frequently posited for Germanic languages, including English. For example, secondary stress is said to arise in compound words like vacuum cleaner, where the first syllable of vacuum has primary stress, while the first syllable of cleaner is usually said to have secondary stress. However, this analysis is problematic; Bolinger (1986) notes that these may be cases of full vs reduced unstressed vowels being interpreted as secondary stress vs unstressed. See Stress and vowel reduction in English for details.
In Norwegian, the pitch accent is lost from one of the roots in a compound word, but the erstwhile tonic syllable retains the full length (long vowel or geminate consonant) of a stressed syllable; this has sometimes been characterized as secondary stress. [4]
Modern Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants and 5 vowels, depending on the speaker and the analysis.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages, some Finno-Ugric languages, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their descendants do not, with an example being Latin and its descendent Romance languages.
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced". Various contradictory phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.
In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun chroneme is derived from Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos) 'time', and the suffixed -eme, which is analogous to the -eme in phoneme or morpheme. However, the term does not have wide currency and may be unknown even to phonologists who work on languages claimed to have chronemes.
The sound system of Norwegian resembles that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, and all pronunciations are considered by official policy to be equally correct – there is no official spoken standard, although it can be said that Eastern Norwegian Bokmål speech has an unofficial spoken standard, called Urban East Norwegian or Standard East Norwegian, loosely based on the speech of the literate classes of the Oslo area. This variant is the most common one taught to foreign students.
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
In phonetics, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a vowel. A clipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often also reduced.
Akanye or akanje, literally "a-ing", is a sound change in Slavic languages in which the phonemes or are realized as more or less close to. It is a case of vowel reduction.
Stød is a suprasegmental unit of Danish phonology, which in its most common form is a kind of creaky voice (laryngealization), but it may also be realized as a glottal stop, especially in emphatic pronunciation. Some dialects of Southern Danish realize stød in a way that is more similar to the tonal word accents of Norwegian and Swedish. In much of Zealand it is regularly realized as reminiscent of a glottal stop. A probably unrelated glottal stop, with quite different distribution rules, occurs in Western Jutland and is known as the vestjysk stød. The noun stød itself does not have a stød.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.
The phonological system of the Hawaiian language is based on documentation from those who developed the Hawaiian alphabet during the 1820s as well as scholarly research conducted by lexicographers and linguists from 1949 to present.
This article deals with the phonology and phonetics of Standard Modern Greek. For phonological characteristics of other varieties, see varieties of Modern Greek, and for Cypriot, specifically, see Cypriot Greek § Phonology.
Taos is a Tanoan language spoken by several hundred people in New Mexico, in the United States. The main description of its phonology was contributed by George L. Trager in a (pre-generative) structuralist framework. Earlier considerations of the phonetics-phonology were by John P. Harrington and Jaime de Angulo. Trager's first account was in Trager (1946) based on fieldwork 1935-1937, which was then substantially revised in Trager (1948). The description below takes Trager (1946) as the main point of departure and notes where this differs from the analysis of Trager (1948). Harrington's description is more similar to Trager (1946). Certain comments from a generative perspective are noted in a comparative work Hale (1967).
The phonology of Welsh is characterised by a number of sounds that do not occur in English and are rare in European languages, such as the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative and several voiceless sonorants, some of which result from consonant mutation. Stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable in polysyllabic words, while the word-final unstressed syllable receives a higher pitch than the stressed syllable.
This article covers the phonological system of South African English (SAE) as spoken primarily by White South Africans. While there is some variation among speakers, SAE typically has a number of features in common with English as it is spoken in southern England, such as non-rhoticity and the TRAP–BATH split.