Practice question · Multiple choice
Jenkins excludes word-level stress from the Lingua Franca Core yet includes nuclear stress. What explains this distinction for international communication?
Hints
- What communicative work does stress perform at the phrase level versus the single-word level?
- How does context affect a listener's ability to resolve ambiguous lexical items versus conversational emphasis?
Show the answer
A. Nuclear stress conveys pragmatic intent across utterances
Why
Conflating word and sentence stress overlooks communicative function; while lexical stress errors rarely block understanding in context, misplaced nuclear stress misdirects the listener's interpretation of the speaker's core focus and pragmatic meaning.
Practise Stress, Rhythm and Intelligibility
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Languages I is free to start.
More questions on Stress, Rhythm and Intelligibility
- Speech is rated as heavily accented and transcribed with complete accuracy. Why is that not a contradiction…
- English word stress is contrastive: moving it can change one word into another.
- Sort each feature by whether Jenkins's Lingua Franca Core finds it MATTERS for international intelligibility…
- How many dimensions of listener judgement do Munro and Derwing separate?
- Which are true of nuclear stress in English?
- Simplifying an initial consonant cluster by deleting a sound damages intelligibility more than by inserting a…
- Arrange these pronunciation priorities in the order Jenkins's findings suggest for a learner aiming at…