1102: Differentiation of Syllables through Stress (s.s.w.7) Dec 15, 2017

Stress and syllable-structures are linked in many ways, so while throughout the Syllables and Stress Week they have largely been considered separately, many of those ideas overlap. In English, a language heavily affected by stress, stress can be seen to affect the way individual words are pronounced, but language is more than individual words. The reason why Hawai'ian cannot have consonant clusters, for instance, is not only because those don't exist within words, but since words must end in vowels, clusters cannot appear within a sentence. With that in mind, it would seem that words like 'box' [baks] may be considered monosyllabic, but when followed by a word with no onset (most words that start with a vowel), one might assume that the [s] would become an onset, so 'box opener' would be something like 'bok sopener'. To some extent, this is true; were one to slow down a recording of speech enough, it is likely that it would be indistinguishable. However, one way that this does not happen frequently is that each word will have predicable stresses, and if words compounded (or otherwise merged), this changes the stress. Stress is, for example, altered for nouns when they become compounded anyway, which is how people can understand what is a compound when it appears in speech.

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