Accent or Stress (language), in language, special stress emphasis or relative force or loudness given to one syllable of a word, thereby

making that syllable more prominent than the others. The strongest accent is called primary stress; the next most prominent is called secondary stress. In some languages tertiary and weaker stresses are also recognized. In many dictionaries the accents are indicated by such symbols as | for primary or main stress and | for secondary stress. English is a stress language, that is, stress is sometimes used to distinguish meaning (in contrast to tonal languages, for example Mandarin Chinese, which use pitch to differentiate meaning). Almost every English word of two or more syllables has at least one stressed syllable. Frequently the primary stress is placed on an early syllable of a word, as in |downpour and |drumhead; sometimes it falls on the last, as in |reco|mmend and |resto|ration. By changing the accent, many nouns may be made verbs, as an |object but to ob|ject. Stress accent is more complex in the English language than in many other languages. The metres of English poetry are determined entirely by accent, rather than by the quantities of vowels.

Phonology, branch of theoretical linguistics that studies the abstract sound systems of languages, rather than the actual physical articulation of all possible speech sounds (phonetics). Most linguists consider phonology a branch of grammar. From among the huge variety of sounds made by even one speaker we are able to recognize those which represent the same sound, although acoustically they are in fact different, and pick out those differences which systematically signal a difference in meaning. The smallest units of sound that carry meaning in a language are called phonemes. A simple test to isolate these meaning-bearing units is the use of minimal pairs, where pairs of words differentiate by one sound only: the three sounds in hot can be demonstrated by showing that the replacement of each in turn results in another word: hot/cot, hot/hit, and hot/hop. In this way, the phonemes of a particular language may be discovered. The test is limited but in English it allows the identification of over 40 phonemes. The exercise also reveals the patterns of sound combination that are permitted in a language (for example zot in English but not fsot), and allows the discovery of allophones (variants of each phoneme that do not affect meaning) in a language. Phonemes are not letters; they refer to the sound of a spoken utterance. For example, flocks and phlox have exactly the same five phonemes. Similarly, bill and Bill are identical phonemically,

regardless of the difference in meaning. Each language has its own inventory of phonetic differences that it treats as phonemic, that is, as necessary to distinguish meaning. For practical purposes, the total number of phonemes for a language is the least number of different symbols adequate to make an unambiguous graphic representation of its speech that any native could read if given a sound value for each symbol, and that any foreigner could pronounce correctly if given additional rules covering nondistinctive phonetic variations that the native makes automatically. Each phoneme may be described in terms of its articulatory or acoustic criteria, such as place of articulation, and with or without voice (for example, the contrast between k and g). These components are known as distinctive features: they give considerable detail about the sound patterning of a language, and can be used to describe both vowels and consonants in the same terms. Distinctive feature theory is primarily associated with generative linguistics, with the aim of building up an account of phonology that interacts within generative grammatical theory. The analysis of speech into individual segments (vowels and consonants) is known as segmental phonology; another branch is suprasegmentals. Theories within this branch focus on prosodic and paralinguistic features and their functions, for example stress, accent, and intonation contours, which extend over units greater than the segment, such as syllables and phrases. Prosodic phonology and autosegmental phonology are two suprasegmental approaches.