2. Word stress in English

Gut defines stress as a property of syllables which “refers to the relative prominence a syllable has” (2013: 244). There are languages where word stress plays just a minor role; in English, however, every word has a specific stress pattern.  English is a language with free lexical stress. That means that all content words with two or more syllables have at least one stressed syllable (Gut 2013: 244).        

When analysing word stress it has to be considered that it is a relative category. Listeners are able to detect stressed syllables in words because they appear more prominent. Nevertheless, the degree of stress of a syllable has to be compared with other syllables of the word in order to draw conclusions (Gut 2013: 245). Most phonologists state that there are two or three different levels of stress: primary, secondary and tertiary stress (Gut 2013: 245). There are two methods of analysing word stress – the auditory and the acoustic method – which are explained in the following subsections.

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