Topic-149: Stress as a Suprasegmental Feature Stress is basically a suprasegmental feature applied to a whole syllable when it is made prominent by adding factors such as loudness, rise in pitch, length of duration and vowel quality (in contrast with other syllables. For example, in mi-ni-mi-ZA-tion, the second last (penultimate) syllable is prominent (as greater amount of energy is applied to it) as it is louder and longer than the rest of the syllables in the word. Similarly, its quality and pitch are different than that of others. All these factors make it stressed compare IN-sult vs. inSULT and be-LOW vs. BILL-ow). Stress is an important feature both in phonetics and phonology. Despite the fact that it has been extensively studied, there remain many areas of disagreement among the experts. To begin with a basic point, it is almost certainly true that in all languages some syllables are in some sense stronger than other syllables these are syllables that have the potential to be described as stressed. Stress plays an important role in conveying (and changing) meaning.
