The use of stress in speech helps us both deliver and understand meaning in longer sentences and it is closely linked with intonation. Before we consider intonation, let’s learn about which syllables are stressed and why.
Say out loud the following sentence using more stress on the capitalized syllables:
He LIVES in the HOUSE on the CORner.

The capitals have not been used where they would usually occur (i.e. on He) in order to preserve the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables.) The above example sentence conveys three different ideas:

• He lives in the house and doesn’t work there.
• He resides in a particular house; that house is what the people involved in the conversation would consider to be important, as opposed to a flat or a bungalow;
• The precise location of the house is at the junction of two or more streets, this junction being either familiar or obvious to the hearer.

We can see that three content words (lives, house and corner) convey the most important ideas in the sentence. The rest of the sentence consists of function words, which we need in order to make our language hold together.
Let’s look closer at the word corner; it has two syllables, the first one being stressed, and the
second one unstressed, as follows: CORner.

If ask you ‘Where is John’s house?’ and it happens to be at a junction of two or more streets, that junction being either known to us both or obvious to us both, you might answer like this:

It’s on the CORner.

The first syllable of corner in this sentence is the tonic syllable. It is usually indicated by underlining. Corner is the most important word in the sentence as it effectively answers the question Where? The tonic syllable is the most stressed syllable in a sentence – it is generally longer and louder.

If, on the other hand, one friend asks another to confirm where John’s house is, the question might be ‘Where did you say John lives?’ In this case, a possible answer is as follows:
He LIVES in the house on the CORner.

You can hear that lives is given some stress so it is written in capitals. Lives in this sentence is the onset syllable, in that it establishes a pitch that stays more or less level right through to COR- (which is still our tonic syllable), on which it drops.

That the word house is not stressed here tells us that this is shared knowledge between the speakers, and it is not necessary to point this out. It is possible to detect a small degree of stress on house, but relative to lives and COR- it is noticeably less prominent.

The new information that is being shared between speakers determines what is the tonic syllable. Look at this example:
John lives in the block of flats on the corner, doesn’t he?
No, he LIVES in the HOUSE on the corner.

Here, lives is again an onset syllable, but the tonic syllable is now house, reflecting the importance of this word within the utterance. No is also a tonic syllable, and is followed by a pause. While the first syllable of corner is stressed when the word is said on its own, here it is not given any stress, as it is knowledge already shared between the speakers.

The following example shows a similar effect:
John’s buying the house on the corner, isn’t he?
He Already LIVES in the house on the corner.

Within sentences we emphasise tonic syllables in order to highlight the most significant new information. We use onset syllables to initiate a pitch which continues up to the tonic syllable.

With regard to sentence stress we can outline a three-stage process which enables us to say the same thing in different ways:
1 When we say words of more than one syllable in isolation we will stress one of the syllables.
2 When words are arranged together in a sentence, certain syllables will be stressed in order to convey the most important new information. This may cancel out normal word stress.
3 Intonation is used to give further subtleties of meaning to the syllables we have chosen to stress.

Speakers make certain assumptions with regard to what is old and new information, and express these by means of stress (and intonation) patterns. Hearers confirm or deny these assumptions through their reactions.

Remember also spoken English is not tied to sentences. When conversing, we often use incomplete-sentences, phrases which would be considered ungrammatical if written down, interrupt each other, backtrack and so on. However, a study of stress within complete sentences provides a ‘user-friendly’ way of drawing attention to the main aspects of how we use stress in speech.