Stress Types in English Pronunciation

Improving sentence intonation is one of the key elements in English pronunciation. The four basic types of word stress that lead to proper intonation in English are:

• Tonic stress
• Emphatic stress
• Contrastive stress
• New information stress

Tonic Stress

Tonic stress refers to the syllable in a word which receives the most stress in an intonation unit. An intonation unit has one tonic stress. It's important to remember that a sentence can have more than one intonation unit, and therefore have more than one tonic stress.

Here are some examples of intonation units with the tonic stress bolded:

• He's waiting
• He's waiting / for his friend
• He's waiting / for his friend / at the station

Generally, the final tonic stress in a sentence receives the most stress. In the above example, 'station' receives the strongest stress.

There are a number of instances in which the stress changes from this standard.

Emphatic Stress

If you decide to emphasize something, you can change the stress from the principal noun to another content word such as an adjective (big, difficult, etc.), intensifier (very, extremely, etc.) This emphasis calls attention to the extraordinary nature of what you want to emphasize.

For example:

• That was a difficult test. - Standard statement
• That was a difficult test. - Emphasizes how difficult the test was

There are a number of adverbs and modifiers which tend to be used to emphasize in sentences that receive emphatic stress:

• Extremely
• Terribly
• Completely
• Utterly
• Especially

Contrastive Stress

Contrastive stress is used to point out the difference between one object and another. Contrastive stress tends to be used with determiners such as 'this, that, these and those'.

For example:

• I think I prefer this color.
• Do you want these or those curtains?

Contrastive stress is also used to bring out a given word in a sentence which will also slightly change the meaning.

• He came to the party yesterday. (It was he, not someone else.)
• He walked to the party yesterday. (He walked, rather than drove.)
• He came to the party yesterday. (It was a party, not a meeting or something else.)
• He came to the party yesterday. (It was yesterday, not two weeks ago or some other time.)

New Information Stress

When asked a question, the requested information is naturally stressed more strongly.

For example:

• Where are you from? - I come from Seattle, in the USA.
• What do you want to do? - I want to go bowling.
• When does class begin? - The class begins at nine o'clock.

Use these various types of stress to help improve your pronunciation and understandability.