Free word stress may fall on any syllable in the word and even exceed its bounds: compare Russian words for example: Голова – Головушка – Голову – На голову.

Also the word stress in English and Russian may be performing the semantic function of differentiating lexical units, parts of speech, grammatical forms.

e.g. 'contrast – con'trast дóма – домá

'habit – ha'bitual вóды – воды

Despite the fact that

• The recessive tendency results in placing the word-stress on the initial syllable.

Rhythmic tendency results in

In sentences with

The rhythmic stress

Some Rules of Word-Stress

• In words of

• In prefixal words

• Suffixes:

Up to this point we have talked about stress though there was a simple distinction between "stressed" and "unstressed" syllables with no intermediate levels; such a treatment would be a two-level analysis of stress. Usually, however, we have to recognise one or more intermediate levels. It should be remembered that now we are dealing only with stress within the word; this means that we are looking at words as they are said in isolation, which is a rather artificial situation – we do not often say words in isolation, except for a few such as 'yes', 'no', 'possibly', 'please' and interrogative words such as 'what', 'who', etc., but looking at words in isolation does help us to see stress placement and stress levels more clearly than studying them in the context of continuous speech.

Let us begin by looking at the word 'around' a'r„nd, where the stress always falls clearly on the last syllable and the first syllable is weak. From the point of view of stress, the most important fact about the way we pronounce this word is that on the second syllable the pitch of the voice does not remain level, but usually falls from a higher to a lower pitch. We might diagram the pitch movement as shown below, where the two parallel lines represent the speaker's high and low pitch level:

The prominence that results from this pitch movement, or tone, gives the strongest type of stress; we call this tonic strong stress when we wish to refer specifically to this type of stress. It is also called primary stress.

In some words, we can observe a type of stress that is weaker than tonic strong stress but stronger than that of the first syllable of 'around', for example in the first syllables of the words 'photographic' /ft•'grf‰k/, 'anthropology' /nœr•'pŒl•G‰/. The third syllables of 'activated' /'kt‰v‡t‰d/, 'enterprising' /'ent•pr‚aiz‰š) are also quire prominent, but most speakers of English would probably not feel that they were as strongly stressed as the first two examples. The stress in the first two examples can be called non-tonic strong stress; it is also called secondary stress. It is sometimes represented in transcription with a low mark_, so that the examples could be transcribed as /,ft•'grf‰k/, /,nœr•'pŒl•G‰/.

We have now identified two levels of stress: tonic strong (or primary) and non-tonic strong (or secondary), as well as a third level which could be called unstressed and regarded as being the absence of any recognisable amount of prominence. These are the three levels that we will use in describing English stress. However, it is worth noting that unstressed syllables containing •, ‰, or a syllabic consonant will sound less prominent than an unstressed syllable containing some other vowel. For example, the first syllable of 'poetic' /p'et‰k/ is more prominent than the first syllable of 'pathetic' /p•'œet‰k/. This could be used as a basis for a further division of stress levels, giving us a third and fourth level, but it seems unnecessarily complex to do so.