In Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. Dichotomies and language The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below: Synchronic and diachronic - Synchronic study of a language is... linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some This article discusses the unit of speech. For the computer operating system, see Syllable (operating system). A syllable (ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of speech that is made up of nucleus (most often a vowel) with one or more option phones (single sounds... syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition. However, most would agree that language is a system of communication or reasoning using representation along with metaphor and some manner of logical grammar, all of which presuppose a historical and at least temporarily transcendent standard or truth... languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence.

The way stress manifests itself in the speech stream is highly language-dependent. In some languages, stressed syllables have a higher pitch than non-stressed syllables — so-called For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music). Pitch accent is a tonal system employed in many languages around the world. In a pitch-accented language, there is an accented syllable or mora, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word (the pitch of each syllable... pitch accent (or musical accent). There are also the following types of accents: force accent (also known as dynamic accent), quantitative accent, qualitative accent.

English is a so-called stress-timed language, ie. stressed syllables appear at a roughly constant rate, and non-stressed syllables are shortened to accommodate this. Stressed syllables in English also have higher pitch than unstressed ones.

Stressed syllables are often perceived as more forceful or louder than non-stressed syllables. Research has shown, however, that vocal stress does not imply louder Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i.e., sound, which can then be modified by the articulatory actions of the rest of the vocal apparatus. A voiced sound is produced when the vocal folds vibrate, by an overpressure of... phonation, nor more forceful Articulation may refer to several topics: In speech, linguistics, and communication: Topic-focus articulation Articulation score Place of articulation Manner of articulation In music: Musical articulations (staccato, legato, etc) In education: Articulation (education) In sociology: Articulation (sociology) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages... articulatory gestures.

Some languages have fixed stress, ie. stress is placed always on a given syllable, as in French (français, langue française) is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered in speakers only by Spanish and Portuguese. In 1999 French was the 11th most spoken language in the world being spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother tongue, and... French (where words are always stressed in the last syllable), Finnish is spoken by the majority (92%) in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is an official language in Finland. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is an agglutinative language which modifies the forms of both noun and adjective depending on their roles... Finnish (stress always on the first syllable) or Quechua (Quechua, Runa Simi) is an American Indian language native to South America and related to Aymará, both members of the Quechumaran linguistic stock. It was the official language of the Tahuantinsuyu (Inca empire), and today is spoken in various dialects by some 9.6 million people throughout South America... Quechua and Esperanto flag Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. The name derives from the pseudonym (Dr. Esperanto) under which the Polish philologist L. L. Zamenhof published the language in 1887 (see Esperanto history). His intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language... Esperanto (always on the penultima -- the syllable before the last one). Other languages have stress placed on different syllables in a predictable way (they're said to have a regular stress rule), such as Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. It is said... Latin.

There are also languages like The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. It is the third most common first language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence... English or This article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain. Spanish or Castilian is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first language by about 352 million... Spanish, where stress is unpredictable and arbitrary, being lexical; that is, it comes as part of the word and must be learned with it. In this kind of language two words can differ only by the position of the stress, and therefore it's possible to use stress as a derivative or This article is about inflection in linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point. Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i.e. relational) information, such as grammatical gender, tense, person, etc. Declension and conjugation Those... inflectional device. English shows this with noun/verb pairs such as to record ("to register, to inscribe") vs. a record ("a register, an entry"), where the verb is stressed on the last syllable and the corresponding noun is stressed on the first. Further, many words have different stresses in Diagram showing the geographical locations of selected languages and dialects of the British Isles. British English (or UK English) (en-GB according to RFC 3066) is a collective term for the forms of English spoken in the British Isles. When used by British speakers, it often refers to the written... British English and American English or U.S. English (en-US according to RFC 3066) is the diverse form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. It is the primary language used in the United States. According to the 1990 census, 97 percent of U.S. residents speak... American English.

In The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. Latin itself is considered an Italic but not a Romance language... Romance languages, stress takes part in the A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice... verb conjugation and it produces an interesting phenomenon by which the Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems. In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which... vowels /e/ and /o/ in the root of some verbs become In phonetics, a diphthong (in Greek δίφθογγος) is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. While pure vowels, or monophthongs, are said to... diphthongs when stressed. For example, in Spanish the verb volver has the forms volví, volviste, volvió in the past, and vuelvo, vuelves, vuelve in the present. In these Spanish verbs, stressed /o/ becomes /ue/ and stressed /e/ becomes /ie/ ( Italian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North. The long-established Tuscan standard has, over the... Italian has /o/ → /uo/ instead).

Stress in poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: poieo = create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by... Poetry in English depends upon stress to establish the In literature, meter or metre (sometimes known as prosody) is a term used in the scansion (analysis into metrical patterns) of poetry, usually indicated by the kind of feet and the number of them. For instance, iambic pentameter, dactylic tetrameter, etc. The origin of all meters is ancient Greek poetry... meter of the poem. Stress is usually thought of as strong or weak. Some people distinguish a third, intermediate stress level.

For example: in the word reconsider, the stress pattern is _'recon'sider (intermediate - weak - strong - weak).

See also

• Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech) is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). Whereas phonetics is about the nature of sounds (or phones) per se, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language. For example, /p/ and /b/ in English are distinctive units of... Phonology
• This article discusses the unit of speech. For the computer operating system, see Syllable (operating system). A syllable (ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of speech that is made up of nucleus (most often a vowel) with one or more option phones (single sounds... Syllable
• For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music). Pitch accent is a tonal system employed in many languages around the world. In a pitch-accented language, there is an accented syllable or mora, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word (the pitch of each syllable... Pitch accent
• Timing, in linguistics, refers to the rhythmic qualities of speech in a given language, in particular how syllables are distributed across time. There are two basic ways to assign time units (or beats) to words: stress timing and syllable timing. In a syllable-timed language, every syllable takes up roughly... Timing
• Initial-stress-derivation is a phonological process in English, wherein verbs become nouns or adjectives when the stress is moved to the first syllable from a later one -- usually, but not always, the second. This is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but is not present in all... Initial-stress-derived noun