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d) Other words, also essential for the meaning, are stressed,
but the pitch on these words remain unchanged.This is called
sentence-stress
e) Form words, performing grammatical functions ( such as
articles, prepositions, auxiliary, modal, and link verbs) are usually
left unstressed; they are mostly pronounced in their reduced
forms.
f) Connected English speech comes as a series of closely-
knit groups of words, each group containing only one stressed
syllable. The stressed syllables occur at approximately equal
intervals of time, e.g.;

It’ isn’t e’xactly what I want.

The result of this subtle interrelationship of stress and time is a
peculiar rhythm resembling a drum-beat.
g) The rate of speech is not constant, but is made to suit the
semantic weight of each sentence or sense-group of the utterance.
h) The timbre of the voice changes in accordance with the
emotions experienced by the speaker.
All the phonetic features of the sentence enumerated above
(pauses, speech melody, sentence stress, rhythm, tempo and
timbre) form a complex unity, called intonation.
The most important components of intonation from the linguistic
point of view are: speech melody, sentence stress, and rhythm.
It shoud be borne in mind that all the components of information
are closely connected; none of them can be separated in actual
speech.

Word Stress

While pronouncing words in isolation we can distinguish
syllables which are articulated with different degrees of

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