Structural words là gì

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Sentence Stress in English

Sentence stress is the music of spoken English. Likeword stress, sentence stress can help you to understand spoken English, especially when spoken fast.

Sentence stress is what gives English itsrhythmor beat. You remember that word stress is accent onone syllablewithin aword. Sentence stress is accent oncertain wordswithin asentence.

Most sentences have two types of word:

• content words
• structure words

See more below:

Content words are the key words of a sentence. They are the important words that carry the meaning or sense.

Structure words are not very important words. They are small, simple words that make the sentence correct grammatically. They give the sentence its correct form or structure.

If you remove the structure words from a sentence, you will probably still understand the sentence.

If you remove the content words from a sentence, you willnotunderstand the sentence. The sentence has no sense or meaning.

Imagine that you receive this telegram message:

This sentence is not complete. It is not a grammatically correct sentence. But you probably understand it. These 4 words communicate very well.Somebody wants you toselltheircarfor them because they havegonetoFrance.We can add a few words:

The new words do not really add any more information. But they make the message more correct grammatically. We can add even more words to make one complete, grammatically correct sentence.But the information is basically the same:

In our sentence, the 4key words[sell, car, gone, France] are accentuated orstressed.

Why is this important for pronunciation? It is important because it adds music to the language. It is therhythmof the English language. It changes the speed at which we speak [and listen to] the language.The time between each stressed word is the same.

In our sentence, there is1 syllablebetween SELL and CAR and3 syllablesbetween CAR and GONE. But thetime[t] between SELL and CAR and between CAR and GONE is the same. We maintain a constant beat on the stressed words. To do this, we say my moreslowly, and because Ive morequickly. We change the speed of the small structure words so that the rhythm of the key content words stays the same.

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Rules for Sentence Stress in English

The basic rules of sentence stress are:

1. content wordsarestressed
2. structure wordsareunstressed
3. thetime between stressed wordsis always thesame

The following tables can help you decide which words arecontent wordsand which words arestructure words:

Content words stressed

Structure words unstressed

Exceptions

The above rules are for for what is called neutral or normal stress. But sometimes we can stress a word that would normally be only a structure word, for example to correct information. Look at the following dialogue:

Theyve been to Mongolia, havent they?
No,THEYhavent, butWEhave.

Note also that when be is used as a main verb, it is usually unstressed [even though in this case it is a content word].

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