10 Facts About Lexical stress

Since Lexical stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch, it is difficult to define Lexical stress solely phonetically.

Statements about the position of Lexical stress are sometimes affected by the fact that when a word is spoken in isolation, prosodic factors come into play, which do not apply when the word is spoken normally within a sentence.

In some languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Lakota and, to some extent, Italian, Lexical stress is even represented in writing using diacritical marks, for example in the Spanish words and.

Sometimes, Lexical stress is fixed for all forms of a particular word, or it can fall on different syllables in different inflections of the same word.

The English words insight and incite are distinguished in pronunciation only by the fact that the Lexical stress falls on the first syllable in the former and on the second syllable in the latter.

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An example of a natural prosodic Lexical stress pattern is that described for French above; Lexical stress is placed on the final syllable of a string of words.

Prosodic Lexical stress is often used pragmatically to emphasize particular words or the ideas associated with them.

In English, Lexical stress is most dramatically realized on focused or accented words.

Since Lexical stress takes part in verb conjugation, that has produced verbs with vowel alternation in the Romance languages.

The authors argue that the reason that Persian listeners are stress "deaf" is that their accent locations arise postlexically.