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Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word ''(lexical stress)'' and at the level of the phrase or sentence ''(prosodic stress)''. Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced" (or sometimes with a syllabic consonant as the syllable nucleus rather than a vowel). Various phonological analyses exist for these phenomena. ==Lexical and prosodic stress== Lexical stress (word stress) is regarded as being phonemic in English; the position of the stress is generally unpredictable and can serve to distinguish words. For example, the words ''insight'' and ''incite'' are distinguished in pronunciation only by the fact that the stress is placed on the first syllable in the former word, and on the second syllable in the latter. Similarly, the noun and the verb ''increase'' are distinguished by the placement of the stress in the same way – this is an example of an initial-stress-derived noun. Moreover, even within a given letter sequence and a given part of speech, lexical stress may distinguish between different words or between different meanings of the same word (depending on differences in theory about what constitutes a distinct word): For example, initial-stress pronunciations of ''offense'' and ''defense'' denote concepts specific to sports, whereas pronunciations with stress on the words' respective second syllables denote concepts related to the legal (and, for ''defense'', the military) field and encountered in sports only as borrowed from the legal field in the context of adjudicating rules violations. Some words are shown in dictionaries as having two levels of stress: primary and secondary. For example, the RP pronunciation of ''organization'' may be given as , with primary stress on the fourth syllable, secondary stress on the first syllable, and the remaining syllables unstressed. For different ways of analysing levels of stress in English, see below. English also has relatively strong prosodic stress, whereby particular words within a phrase or sentence are given additional stress in order to place emphasis on the information that they convey. There is also said to be a natural "tonic stress" which falls on the last stressed syllable of a prosodic unit – for more on this, see below under . English is classed as a ''stress-timed language'', which means that there is a tendency to speak so that the stressed syllables come at roughly equal intervals. See Isochrony. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Stress and vowel reduction in English」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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