We've Got Rhythm

In English, just like different syllables are stressed in words, different words are stressed in sentences. As a result, English has a natural rhythm that helps you understand what you hear--and be more understandable when you speak.

"There is a great deal of evidence that native speakers rely very much on the stress pattern of words when they are listening. In fact, experiments have demonstrated that often when a native speaker mishears a word, it is because the foreigner has put the stress in the wrong place, not because he or she mispronounced the word." (Joanne Kenworthy, Teaching English Pronunciation, 1987)

Content words are the words (main verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and negative auxiliaries) that carry the meaning in each English sentence. These words are best explained in a dictionary, and there are a lot of them. They usually have a fixed stress or stresses--and are usually longer than 2 letters.

The rest of the words are structure words (pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs). These words make sentences grammatically correct, and they're best explained in terms of how they fit into sentences. They vary in pronunciation for emphasis (e.g. "have" can be said as "I've" or "I have.")

For example: I sold my car because I went to France.

The 4 content (important) words in this sentence are, "sold," "car," "went," and "France." If those were the only words you heard, you would still understand that somebody sold their car and went to France. The structure (other) words (I, my, because, to) make the sentence clear and grammatically correct, but they don't really add more information.

There's only one syllable between "sold" and "car" and three syllables between "car" and "went." However, when you say the sentence, you need to keep the time between each of those content words the same (by saying "my" more slowly, "because I" more quickly, and "to" more slowly).

In other words, change the speed of the structure words to keep the rhythm of the key content words the same.

When there is more than one syllable in a content word, the stressed syllable in each content word that is stressed in each sentence. In these sentences, the content (important) words are: the subject ("students") the verb ("take") and the object ("tests"), while the stressed syllables are "stu," "tak," and "tests."

Students take tests.

The students take the tests. (Th'stud'nts take th'tests.)

The students are taking the tests. (Th' stud'nts'r tak'n th'tests.)

The students have been taking the tests. (Th' stud'nts'v'been tak'n th'tests.)

The rhythm of the sentence is achieved by "squishing" the structure syllables together to keep the time between the stressed syllables in the content words ("stu," "take," and "tests") the same.