Obaba Museum

Stress is a concept we’re all familiar with, when a strain or unnecessary pressure mounts up we say we are stressed the definition however varies from person to person or even circumstances.

In linguistics stress could mean the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. In English, stressed syllables are louder than non-stressed syllables. Also, they are longer and have a higher pitch.
Stress is indicated with a stress Mark (‘) or stroke (|)before the stress syllable eg. /’vision/.

Tips for identifying stress in words

1. Generally affixes are not stressed.
2. For words ending with suffixes like “ion, ily, ic, ial, ian” the stress is usually on the penultimate syllable.
3. In polysyllabic words ending with the suffixes “ate, cal, al, fy, cy, ty, phy, gy” the stress is usually on the antepenultimate
4. Words with suffixes “ment” retain the same stress as the root word.
5. Polysyllabic words with the suffixes “sion, ist, ize, able, tor, ry” are usually stressed on the ante penultimate
6. Weak vowels (schwa sounds) are not stressed at all e.g aGAIN
9. In words that you can not quickly spot any prefix or suffix or u have more than one root words, stress placement may be difficult
10. Words that are mono syllabic in nature are naturally stressed
11. The teen in number words are often stressed e.g sevenTEEN
12. In a two syllable words the syllable that has a dipthong or long vowel sound usually carries the stress e.g deBATE /ei/

Thanks for reading through, let’s know what you think about this in the comments.