Now, let’s move the stress to the third word and see how the meaning changes: Here, the speaker’s meaning is, “It is not true that I said he stole the money. Now, listen to what happens when we move the stress to the second word: But what does she mean? She is trying to say that she is not the person who said the man stole the money. The speaker stressed the word “I” more than all the other words. I think you can identify which word is being stressed. Yet, by putting stress on one word each time, we can give the seven-word sentence seven different meanings. But notice that one single word doesn’t grab your attention. Naturally, some words carry a little more stress than others. By the end of the program, you will understand its simple genius. I chose a sentence that English language teachers have been using for years. Today, we will do a listening exercise to explore the connection between sentence stress and meaning.
Smith notes that, in English, even when you use the same words, you can get very different meanings. Her YouTube channel, Rachel’s English, has become a respected tool for learning about pronunciation. Rachel Smith is an American English pronunciation expert based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On this Everyday Grammar program, I will use a simple sentence to show you what that sounds like and how meaning can change completely when the sentence stress changes. Sentence stress is saying a word or words in a sentence louder and longer than the other words. The word “painting,” for instance, has two syllables. Word stress is saying one syllable of a word louder and longer than the other syllables.
English speakers use two kinds of stress together when they speak: word stress and sentence stress. When we talk about stress in spoken language, we are talking about saying something louder and holding the sound a little longer. If you are listening to this program, you just heard me add stress to the word “not” to help make that message clear. But, as you know, that is not true for English. In some languages, speakers say each word in a sentence with equal stress.
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