Sentence Stress

In English, we don’t say all words in a sentence with equal emphasis. Rhythm means you need to change from low to high, short to long, and soft to loud sounds. In other words, rhythm is the combined changes in the pitch, duration, and volume of sounds in speech.

In a sentence, we stress certain words by saying them louder, longer and with higher pitch than others, so the listener understands the most important parts of the message. Normally, we place stress on content words and not on function words.

Content Words	Function Words
Nouns: house, doctor, idea	Articles: a, an, the
Main verbs: sleep, drink, run, go	Helper verbs: am, is, does, did, has, had, can
Adjectives: small, ugly, wonderful, funny	Personal pronouns: I, me, you, he, her, him
Adverbs: rarely, happily, sometimes	Possessive adjectives: my, his, her, your, its, their
Demonstrative pronouns: this, that, these, those (sometimes)	Demonstrative adjectives: this, that, these, those
Possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his, hers, theirs	Relative pronouns: whose, that, which, who, whom
Question words: who, what, where, when, why, how (but often not in common phrases)	Conjunctions: and, but, so, or, before, because, while
Negative: not, isn’t, don’t, hasn’t, can’t	Prepositions: to, in, on, with, for, under, over

To understand how rhythm involves the change between stressed and unstressed syllables, read the following examples of these stress patterns shared by words and sentences.

The big O represents the stressed syllables and the small o represents the unstressed syllables.

RHYTHM PATTERNS
O o TEACHer GET it.
o O reFUSE She LEFT.
o O o adVANtage He WANTS it.
O o O o enterTAIner (“en” receives secondary stress) DAVE’S a DOCtor.

In many languages, every syllable in a sentence gets the same amount of stress. These languages are called syllable-timed languages.

However, English is a stress-timed language, which means the amount of time between the stressed syllables stays about the same, no matter how many unstressed syllables there are. The unstressed syllables are shortened to keep this pattern.

Read the following examples that illustrate this point.

CATS EAT FISH.

CATS have to EAT some FISH.

CATS might have to EAT a lot of FISH.

Each of these sentences takes about the same amount of time to say. In order to keep the time between the stressed syllables the same, we say the unstressed syllables quickly, and that makes the important stressed words clearer.

Please note that the stress in a sentence is not always on the same words for every speaker and context. While there is a general pattern, the placement of stress can depend on which words each individual speaker thinks are important.

Practice: Listen to these lines from the conversation again. Using the chart above, decide which words are most likely stressed and check your answers.

1. After I get up, I take a shower.
2. I head over to the kitchen.
3. I’ll leave the dishes for days.
4. Raj is a security guard at the hospital.
5. We’re all a bunch of workaholics.

Thought Groups

Which one sounds more natural, 1 or 2?

I wash up right after I eat, or I’ll leave the dishes for days.

That’s because when we talk, we make pauses. Pauses help us to not get tired as speakers, but they also make it easier for listeners to understand. The group of words between pauses are called thought groups, and each thought group has meaning and a grammatical structure.

We generally pause after a phrase, clause or sentence, and in writing, these pauses are indicated by punctuation like commas, semicolons, and periods. A / represents a minor pause like a comma, and a // represents a longer pause like a period.

You can change the meaning of your sentence depending on where you pause, so pausing in the wrong places can confuse your listener. Let’s listen to these examples:

Let’s eat / Grandpa / before it’s too late.

Let’s eat Grandpa / before it’s too late.

In the first sentence, the pauses mean the speaker is suggesting that Grandpa and everyone else should eat.

In the second sentence, the single pause means the speaker is suggesting everyone should eat Grandpa, and this is probably not what the speaker means.

It’s important to know that different speakers don’t always pause in the same spots because they talk at different speeds. A faster speaker uses fewer pauses, and a slower or more dramatic speaker uses more. To learn more about thought groups, go to the Resources page.

Practice: Where are the pauses in these sentences? 

1. After I get up, I take a shower, and then I put some work clothes on.
2. It’s usually the first time all day that I check Facebook, read the news, watch stupid YouTube videos, or play word games.
3. But my boyfriend and I almost didn’t go because he’s got a crazy work schedule too, crazier than yours.
4. Then, since he’s not much of a cook and is too tired to whip something up, he usually just grabs a banana, has some toast, and downs 2 cups of coffee.
5. When he gets home, we watch something on Netflix, and then he calls it a night around 11. He sleeps like the dead.