Word Stress. Basic Word Stress Patterns
Word stress is the phonetic prominence given to a syllable in a word [1; 2; 9]. Word stress is described as a potential for utterance stress, i.e. the syllable which carries word stress is likely to carry utterance stress when the word is pronounced in speech. J. Wells, for example, defines word stress as a lexical, or a potential stress which is realized in speech as intonational pitch-prominence, or an accent [9].
Word stress is free in English, so each word has its own word stress pattern (unlike in French, Polish etc. where word stress falls on the same syllable in all words). A word stress pattern is a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in a word. In spite of the fact that there are many words in English, the number of basic word stress patterns is limited. All English words are distributed between two basic stress patterns:
One stress pattern – single-stressed words.
Two stress pattern – double-stressed words.
Syllables in a word have different degrees of phonetic prominence. First of all, they are either stressed or unstressed. Secondly, stressed syllables also differ in the degree of prominence especially in case of double-stressed words – they carry either a primary stress, or a secondary stress, or a tertiary stress (in American English). So, the following degrees of word stress are distinguished in the English language [1; 7; 8; 9]:
primary;
secondary;
tertiary;
weak (absence of stress).
For more information about the degrees of word stress see two-stress pattern.
Do not mix up word stress with utterance stress and its degrees.
Degrees of Utterance Stress
full stress (nuclear or non-nuclear);
partial stress;
weak stress (absence of prominence).
About the correlation of word stress and utterance stress see here.