Stress in English and Persian Language

Stress is the effect of emphasizing certain syllable by increasing their loudness, length or pitch. A stressed syllable is one that is made prominent in this way, and in contrasts with the syllables that are unstressed. Some descriptions refer to degrees of stress, ie, primary and secondary, but for practical purposes these distinctions are unimportant. Word stress refers to prominence at the word level, while sentence stress refers to the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables over a whole sentence. There are few reliable rules as to which syllable is stressed in a word. But there is a tendency in two syllable words to place the stress on the first syllable. The aim of present paper is to indicate similarities and differences between English and Persian stress in parts of speech through comparison and contrast. The selected examples indicated that in Persian, the place of stress related to the parts of speech while, in English, the place of stress is not certain, learners should learn stress along with each words.

Keywords:

Syllable , Major Stress , Minor Stress , Stress