SENTENCE STRESS TABLE
SENTENCE STRESS TABLE
SENTENCE STRESS TABLE
TONALITY
The first matter a speaker has to decide when planning an utterance is the division of spoken
material into chunks, and each chunk will be associated with an intonation pattern. They are called
intonation phrases. The intonation structure reflects the grammatical structure, and an intonation
break generally corresponds to a syntactic boundary. Consequently, the presence or absence of
intonation breaks signals to the hearer the syntactic structure of the sentence. Tone groups normally
reflect a single idea or thought.
/ → intonation break │ // → intonation break + pause (punctuation mark)
We normally place intonation breaks between:
1. Sentences: division is obligatory, it stops with: ‘.’, ‘?’ and ‘!’.
2. Clauses: obligatory. If we have two clauses, it will be two subjects and to verbs.
3. Vocatives at the beginning of the clause: a vocative is whenever we refer to a person
(name, title of address, mom, etc.). After a vocative, you always have a comma. If the
vocative is at the end, we can choose to put the break or not. E.g. / Come in, // Claire. //
OR / Come in, Claire. //
4. Adverbials at the beginning of the clause: obligatory. E.g. / Tomorrow, // we’ll have a
test. //
5. Adverbials in the middle of a clause: obligatory. E.g. / Paul, // luckily, // came on
time. //
6. Sentence adverbials: they affect all the sentence. Obligatory. E.g. / I don’t believe
you, // actually. //
7. Subject/predicate: optional, only if the subject is too long. E.g. / The principal director
of the company in Texas / went to New York by plane for a meeting. //
8. Non-defining relative clauses: obligatory. E.g. / my friend, // who works in the
hospital, // is sick. //
9. Parallel structures (enumerations): obligatory. E.g. / a new country, // a new
school, // new teacher. //
10. Question tags: obligatory. E.g. / It is lovely, // isn’t it? //