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Abstract

Sentence stress is one of the most prominent elements of intonation. For the unmarked cases certain regularities can be observed as to its location, however, it has no single, established once-and-for-all site in an utterance, instead it is used to signify and signal additional information, such as thematic/rhematic structure, co-reference, contrast or emphasis. The fact is that within a linguistic unit containing more than one stressed syllable, these stresses will be perceived as being of different relative prominence. This difference is normally used to perform a number of varied linguistic function. Yet, it appears to be rarely consciously used. This feature of connected speech has been given relatively little attention, both within discussions of phonological systems of individual languages as well as in a contrastive or interactional perspective. The paper attempts to partially fi ll this gap by investigating the awareness of additional meanings carried by the marked/variable position of sentence stress. The investigations will focus on Polish speakers of English, as users of their native Polish language but also as competent users of English. The respondents are residents of Poland who have passed the extended level of the fi nal secondary school leaving examination in English at the minimum level of 80%. The observation of this preliminary study seems to be that Polish speakers modify their sentence stress patterns proportionally to the growing profi ciency and impact of other languages, with slightly different patterning than as predicted by, among others, the normative sources.

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Authors and Affiliations

Anita Buczek-Zawiła

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