Practice question · True or false
English word stress is contrastive: moving it can change one word into another.
Hints
- Consider the noun and the verb spelled the same way.
- REcord against reCORD, INsult against inSULT.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, which is why English word stress has to be learned per word rather than derived from a rule. Languages with fixed stress — French on the final syllable, Czech on the first — cannot use it this way, since it is predictable and therefore carries no information.
Practise Stress, Rhythm and Intelligibility
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