Sentential stress

It is important to note that the term stress is used in a number of different ways in the linguistics literature. The most fundamental distinction is between lexical stress and sentential stress. Lexical stress is a core property of a word, and as such doesn t change. In our previous example, TABLE is stressed on the first syllable while machine is stressed on the second and these are properties of the words themselves. Sentential stress on the other hand describes the effect whereby one syllable in the sentence receives more stress than the others and this is normally due to some pragmatic or communication reason, and is not a fundamental property of the word itself (e g. 1 SAID 1 WANTED THAT ONE. We shall ignore this second type of stress for now as this is dealt with in detail in Chapter 8. 

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