Contents

1 Introduction..........................................................................................................3 2 Stress.....................................................................................................................4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 Word Stress..........................................................................................4 Sentence Stress....................................................................................5 Shift Stress...........................................................................................6 Contrastive and Emphatic Stress.........................................................7 GA versus RP.......................................................................................7 Approach............................................................................................10 Results................................................................................................11

3 Research: Word Stress in GA and RP..............................................................10

4 Conclusion...........................................................................................................12 5 Bibliography........................................................................................................13 6 Appendix: Assessment of Recordings and Questionnaire...................................14

1. Introduction As the title suggests, this term paper deals with the nature and characteristics of stress. In the following, the most relevant features of this highly fundamental topic within the linguistics will be covered and illustrated as straightforward as the limitation of ten pages allows to do so. While the first part of this paper is fairly theoretical, the second one represents quite the opposite as it presents the findings of an actual,