Special education of the republic of uzbekistan

1 syllable	2 syllables	3 syllables
4 syllables
Cities	Leith	Cardiff	Manchester	Wolverhampton
Boy’s name
Girl’s name
Animals
Countries
Rivers

Primary and Secondary Stress

R ead the 4 – syllable words. In Alexander, Wolverhampton and Mississippi those with the pattern, the first syllable sounds stronger than the second and fourth, but not as strong as the third. Think of them as:

alexander / wolverhampton / mississippi
A similar thing happens in the case of 3– syllable words with the pattern, e.g.

cigarette / chimpanzee / japanese / picturesque
It is not enough, then, simply to talk of syllables as being either stressed or weak; with words of three or more syllables it may be necessary to distinguish three degrees of stress; primary, secondary and weak (or unstressed).

So, in the case of these two patterns it might be better to show them as:

(e.g. cigarette) = secondary stress + weak + primary stress and
(e.g. Alexander) = secondary stress + weak + primary stress + weak

Weak Syllables and Schwa
As a general rule we can say that every syllable contains a vowel sound. A second general rule is that the shorter the vowel, the shorter and weaker the syllable.

Now let us take another look at some of the words already examined, this time concentrating on the vowel sounds in the weak syllables. To help us do this we will start to use phonetic notation where one symbol = one sound. This is because standard spelling often makes it difficult to see what the sounds really are.