Stress

Stress

Attridge (1982: 62-67) defines stress as the relative prominence of a syllable in a sequence. This prominence over neighbouring syllables can be achieved and measured by:

• pitch: a rise in intonation
• duration: a prolonged articulation
• amplitude: a rise in volume and intensity
• sound quality: especially in English the reduced vowel [ə] marks an unstressed syllable

Concerning the quality of stress, Duffell (2008: 19) states that “[t]he traditional terminology recognizes three levels of stress (primary, secondary, and non-stress)”. However, he adds, this classification has been replaced by the assumption that “stress is a continuum, and that the number of levels of stress identifiable in utterances varies.”

As Duffell (2008: 19) points out, one can further distinguish between phrasal stress and lexical stress (which refers to “at least one syllable of lexical words”).

When talking about verse, it is important to bear in mind that ictus and stress are different categories since stress refers to the concrete realisation and ictus to an abstract metrical level as you can also see in this diagram. Yet, stress and ictus may coincide, of course, and frequently do so. Tarlinskaja (1976: 3) uses the following nomenclature to describe the relationship between stress and ictus: “A stress on an ictus is called ictic or metrical, on a non-ictus, non-ictic or extra-metrical.”

Created with the Personal Edition of HelpNDoc: Single source CHM, PDF, DOC and HTML Help creation