The organs of speech

1. the cardinal and ordinal numerals from 13 to 19;

2. compound adjectives: “old - fashioned”, “fair - haired”;

3. words with some prefixes:

a) negative prefixes un-, in-, ir-, il-, im-,non-, dis-, under-,anti-,

e.g. unable, non - final, incomplete;

b) prefixes with different meaning vice-, mis-,

e.g. vice –“assistance”, mis – “wrong”, ex – “former”, re – “repetition”, pre – “before”, over – “too much”, half – “almost”, inter – “among”, ultra – “almost”.

e.g. vice - chairman, misunderstand, ex - president, retell, pre-war, overdo, half - starved, international, ultramodern;

c) in composite verbs: put on, take off.

The role of stress is extremely great as it can change the meaning of the word or its grammatical form.

e.g. a black bird – a blackbird

a green house – a greenhouse

Word stress can differentiate various parts of speech:

Noun: Verb: Adjective: Verb:

object object frequent frequent

In English, as a rule, all semantically important words are stressed. They are: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals, demonstrative pronouns, interrogative pronouns and absolute possessive pronouns.

Link, modal, auxiliary verbs, articles, possessive and reflexive pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions are unstressed.

There are special cases when usually unstressed words receive stress in a sentence under certain conditions.

1. 
   Link, modal and auxiliary verbs are stressed:
   

1. 
   At the beginning of a general or alternative questions
   

e.g. Is she a teacher? Must I read it now or shall I do it tomorrow?