A Suprasegmental Analysis of Selected English Sentences Taken from English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course by Peter Roach (2000)

EFL Learners who are not familiar with the production and perception of the aspects of English suprasegmental phonology, including stress, rhythm, intonation and aspects of connected speech are likely to have difficulty in understanding native speakers of English who do normally use these aspects naturally and spontaneously in everyday conversations. The present study is an attempt to study one aspect of English suprasegmentals, namely, stress by shedding a spot light on stress in general, word stress and sentence stress, so as to have good intelligibility in English by EFL learners. To arrive at this aim, the suprasegmental analysis of this study is based on sentences deliberately selected from Roach s book entitled English Phonetics and Phonology: A practical Course (2000). The results of the analysis show that English sentence stress is affected by a number of factors. They are as follows: l-Sentence stress depends heavily on the grammatical categories of the words in a sentence, i.e., whether they are (content words) which are stressed or (function words) which are unstressed. 2-The place of a word in a sentence is important where the type of stress which is called (tonic stress) is normally found at the end of a sentence. 3-The grammatical type of a sentence, i.e., whether a sentence is a statement, interrogative, etc is also influential in sentence stress where each type has its own stress pattern. As far as negation is concerned, it is found that stress is put on the function words in spite of the fact that they are unstressed in the affirmative case.4-stress is used with certain function words in a sentence such as, demonstratives to achieve certain purposes such as contrastiveness or emphasis