Wikipedia Article of the Day
Randomly selected articles from my personal browsing history
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress solely phonetically. The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress. Some languages have fixed stress, meaning that the stress on virtually any multisyllable word falls on a particular syllable, such as the penultimate (e.g. Polish) or the first (e.g. Finnish). Other languages, like English and Russian, have lexical stress, where the position of stress in a word is not predictable in that way but lexically encoded. Sometimes more than one level of stress, such as primary stress and secondary stress, may be identified. Stress is not necessarily a feature of all languages: some, such as French and Mandarin Chinese, are sometimes analyzed as lacking lexical stress entirely. The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. That is one of the three components of prosody, along with rhythm and intonation. It includes phrasal stress (the default emphasis of certain words within phrases or clauses), and contrastive stress (used to highlight an item, a word or part of a word, that is given particular focus).
History
Dec 11
Newton polynomial
Dec 10
Quantile function
Dec 9
Static site generator
Dec 8
Flag Day (United States)
Dec 7
Seven-segment display character representations
Dec 6
Tori Kelly
Dec 5
Lynn Conway
Dec 4
G7
Dec 3
Nostr
Dec 2
Negative binomial distribution
Dec 1
Toledo War
Nov 30
Laurent series
Nov 29
Interface control document
Nov 28
ANT (network)
Nov 27
Functional analysis
Nov 26
Semiring
Nov 25
Projective set (disambiguation)
Nov 24
Primitive polynomial
Nov 23
Syphilis
Nov 22
Mud dauber
Nov 21
about URI scheme
Nov 20
EverCrisp
Nov 19
Uniform Resource Identifier
Nov 18
Four-square cipher
Nov 17
Gopher
Nov 16
United States presidential election
Nov 15
Gemini (protocol)
Nov 14
Gopher (protocol)
Nov 13
Block cipher mode of operation
Nov 12
List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin