Topic-150: Types and Categories of Stress One of the areas in which a little agreement is found is related to the levels of stress. Some descriptions of languages manage with just two levels (stressed and unstressed, while others use more than two. In English, one can argue that if one takes the word indicator as an example, the first syllable is the most strongly (primarily) stressed one, the third syllable is the next most strongly secondarily) stressed and the second and fourth syllables are weakly stressed or unstressed accordingly. This gives us three levels (primary, secondary and tertiary) and it is possible to argue for more, though this rarely seems to give any practical benefit. Remember that the primary stress is very important in languages like English as it has the ability to change meaning e.g., in two-syllabic words like record or insult, meanings and the category of the words are changed depending upon the prominence (stress) given to the syllables INsult (noun) vs. inSULT (verb whereas in long words (such as minimization, one syllable receives primary stress while other (one or more than one syllable) has the secondary stress. Secondary stress is just for better pronunciation (not changing the meaning. Another division is made between lexical stress (phonemic in nature) and sentence level (emphatic) stress. This is the subject of the next topic.
