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In connected speech we make some words stand out with respect to others, according to the amount and
type of information they carry.
In general, content words are likely to be accented in an utterance: nouns, principal verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs; structural words tend to be unaccented: auxiliary verbs, personal, reflexive and relative pronouns,
prepositions, articles, possessive adjectives, and conjunctions. There is, however, a group of structural words
which are frequently accented: demonstrative and possessive pronouns, interrogative words, and negative
anomalous finites. The following sentence exemplifies this rule:
People who have never come to England before, and think their English is good, often ask themselves why
the man in the street doesn't understand them.
The above rules will often suffer modifications. There exists a certain degree of elasticity in accenting
words, as can be seen if we examine a given utterance spoken either by different speakers, or by the same
speaker in different circumstances. The following sentence, for instance, could be accented in a variety of
ways, although the accentuation of certain words is inevitable:
A more complex set of modifications occurs in order to satisfy English rhythm and usage, and to convey
different meanings. English rhythm requires accented syllables to be separated by unaccented ones - a
tendency which functions both at word and at connected speech level.
1. In sequences of three content words, the second one tends to lose its accent if it has not more than two
syllables, e.g:
2. Phrasal verbs that can take a direct object adopt different accentual patterns, depending on the position
and the nature of the object, as in:
Phrasal verbs that cannot take a direct object are accented on both verb and particle, unless they are
immediately preceded and/or followed by another accented word, e.g.:
come in he woke up
you can't come in he soon woke up
you can come in now he woke up early
3. Many double-accented compounds and some simple words may lose the accent which is closest to another
accent in the utterance, e.g.:
When adjectives are used attributively (i.e next to a noun) they drop their primary accent; when they
are used predicatively (i.e as part of the predicate) they lose their secondary accent, e.g.:
4. Less frequently single-accented words may suffer this rhythmical modification, e.g.:
he said hello
hello, Stephen