Portal:Phonology/Prosody

Above the level of segmentals (vowels, consontants) are suprasegmentals - intonation and stress patterns. These suprasegmentals interact sometimes with the segmental pronunciation, in the form of contractions, blending of sounds (assimilation), cutting off sounds (truncation), and such (natural and fast speech phenomena). Prosody refers to the rhythm of the language, which is affected by suprasegmental features and these related speech phenomena.

1 Word stress

• Stress: Overview
• Old English / Germanic lexical stress patterns
• Contrastive noun/verb stress pairs
• Latin stress patterns (general)
• Greek stress patterns
• French stress patterns
• Secondary lexical stress
• Latin/Greek i-stem suffixes
• Latin/Greek e-stem suffixes
• Stress shifts with suffixes
• Exercising word stress
• Compound stress

2 Stress and intonation beyond word level

• Phrasal stress
• Sentence stress (intro)
• Sentence stress, part 2
• Contrastive stress forms
• Sentence intonation
• Backgrounded phrases in intonation

3 Overview of prosody

• Connected / natural speech phenomena in English (intro)
• Connected / natural speech phenomena, part 2
• Contractions

3.1 Stress, intonation, prosodic effects

• Colloquial contractions
• Compound nouns and WPD version
• The i-stem suffixes: i-stem suffixes like -ion, -ious, -ial, etc., which invariably shift stress to the preceding syllable; also, e-stem suffixes; WPD version
• Common lexical stress patterns in English, and stress identification guidelines; WPD version
• Neutral and strong affixes: overview of neutral suffixes that don't affect stress, strong suffixes that lead to stress shifts; [WPD version
• Neutral and strong suffixes #2: more detailed presentation of suffixes and stress patterns; WPD version
• Phrasal verbs
• Stress shifts in word formation (stress & morphology) [WPD version, [http://www.kentlee7.com/phon/stress_shifts_alt.pdf older PDF version
• Sentence stress: overview of sentence stress rules
• Background info & other phrases that do not receive sentence stress; also, overview of sentence stress and contrastive stress