Word Stress Sentence Position American English Pronunciation
Today I’m going to go over something I find
quite interesting about American English.
And that is, how different the same word can
sound depending on where it falls in a sentence.
I’ve been noticing recently, some of my students
from certain countries have the tendency to
accent the last word in the sentence. And
in general, American English goes down in
pitch throughout a sentence. So actually the
words at the end of a sentence should be lower
in pitch, lower in volume, more unstressed
than the same word would be if it came earlier
in the sentence. Let’s take for example the
word ‘home’ in the sentences ‘I’ll be home
by three,’ ‘Last night I drove the car home.’
Let’s hear the word ‘home’ in the first sentence,
‘I’ll be home by three,’ repeated on a loop
a few times to get it into our ear. I’ll be
home by three. Home, home, home, home. And
now the second sentence, ‘Last night I drove
the car home.’ Last night I drove the car
home. Home, home, home, home. And now let’s
compare, switching back and forth. [Home x8]
Clearly they are at two different pitches,
two different volumes. Here I’m using the
software program Pratt to view both sentences
and the loops of the word ‘home’. The first
sentence, I’ll be home by three. And the loop
for the word home in that sentence: home,
home, home. You can see that the volume is
greater compared to the word home in the second
sentence: home, home, home. And down here
we see the pitch. Both of these sentences
have the downward trend, the second one ending
with this little dot down here, as most statements
in English do. The word ‘home’ in the first
sentence, here, quite high in pitch, the word
home in the second sentence, here, quite low
in pitch. Home. This section up here is the
M, sort of just a grumble in the voice. It
sort of stops sounding like speech at this
point, doesn’t it? Home, home, home. It’s
so low in pitch, so low in volume, so –
uhh – far down in the throat. Yet, when you
hear it in the context of the sentence, you
do identify it as the word ‘home.’ Let’s listen
one more time to the loop, where we alternate
the word ‘home’ from the two sentences. [Home x 8]
So keep this in mind when you’re speaking,
when you’re practicing reading out loud. Make
sure you’re not stressing the last word of
a sentence by bringing it up in pitch or making
it louder because in English it’s actually
the opposite. The words at the end of the
sentence will be lower in pitch and also softer.
The final word in a sentence can sometimes
be very low and very soft. That’s it, and
thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.