This speaking lesson focusses on skills related to
- Pronunciation
- intonation
- sentence stress
- content words vs. function words
What is intonation?
Intonation is often described as the musicality of a language. It is also sometimes referred to as sentence stress; a helpful term, because stress is the emphasis speakers place on the important points of their message. Word stress is the emphasis native speakers place on the important syllable in a word. On the other hand, intonation, or sentence stress, is the emphasis native speakers place on the important words or ideas in a full sentence, or longer sample of speech.
What are the important words to stress?
With respect to intonation, there are two types of words in every sentence: function words and content words.
Function Words:
do not carry the meaning of a sentence
- prepositions, auxiliary verbs and articles,
- grammatical and functional in nature.
- pronunciation of function words tends to be:
- destressed
- shorter
- quicker
- more relaxed
For example:
- Why do some ideas or products gain a significant following in social media?
- the orange text indicates function words, that act as the glue for the meaningful terms in the sentence.
Content Words:
carry the meaning and information in a sentence
- nouns, verbs, adjectives, negatives,
- Pronunciation of these words tends to be:
- longer
- louder
- higher in pitch.
For example:
- It's not always clear why an idea, product or meme goes viral, but there are some predictable patterns to how these become popular online.
- The boldfaced text are the meaningful terms in the sentence and are emphasised by the speaker.
Review
Unlock full access by logging in. Registered users can explore the entire lesson and more.