Remember that in word stress we place stress on one syllable within a word. In sentence stress, we place stress on certain words within a sentence. Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm or “beat”.
So, we determine sentence stress by stressing content words and leaving function words unstressed. Content words are words that convey meaning, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Function words are words that don’t convey meaning but are merely used to refer to or join other words (e.g. articles, auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns).
Let’s illustrate how sentence stress works with the following sentence: JANE is a GIRL but JOHN is a BOY. In this sentence, the content words in capital letters are stressed, whereas the function words in small letters are unstressed. In this way, sentence stress is used to draw the listener’s attention to the words that convey more important information.
If you’re interested in a detailed audio-visual explanation of sentence stress with copious examples, you can gain free access to the following video lectures:
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