Teacher Discussion Forums

The intended answers to (1) and (2) are bothers and hate:

Mark the emphatic stress in these sentences.

(1) It bothers me when I get a phone call before 8:00 A.M.

(2) I hate it when people are rude to me on the subway.

(J. C. Richards, New Interchange Students Book 3.)

My question is,

Does the emphasis fall on the designated word if your intention is to convey complaints (otherwise the emphasis will fall on some other word, depending on your intention and situation)?

Thank you in advance

Seiichi MYOGA

Yes, the emphasis would probably naturally fall on the verbs "bothers" and "hate" unless it was on for example "me" and "I" to contrast with what bothers or is hated by another person:

(that may bother YOU but) It bothers ME when.............

(unlike YOU) I (emphasised) hate it when............

Dear JuanTwoThree,

I appreciate your help and comments.

Seiichi MYOGA

This is an interesting way of introducing a comparison:
to contrast with what bothers or is hated by another person

At first, I thought it strange, because something that is formally compared with "me" or "I" is a person, so it must be "to contrast with someone else."

I mean that the contrastive stress on ME is not only in contrast to YOU but also to whatever bothers YOU but not ME


It bothers you that (or if or when ) you don't hear the alarm clock. It bothers ME when I get a phone call before 8:00 A.M.



Another contrast would be:

David: It bothers me when I get a phone call before 8:00 A.M.

Susan: It doesn't bother ME.

I might have explained it this way:

I think we are all familiar with the rule that English sentence stress is located on the stressed syllables of the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). Your voice makes a little jump when you get to those syllables. The second rule, and I'm not sure if this is true in British English, is this: for declarative sentences, the stressed tones are the most stressed at the beginning of the sentence and gradually decrease towards the end. So you get a series of little "mountains", gradually getting smaller. The answers are bothers and hate because those are the first content words in the sentence.

I'm not sure the sentence stress is directly connected to the fact that it is a complaint.

I agree with you, Tara, that by default the stress falls on bothers and then on the subsequent words with the most meaning. It doesn't have much to do with it being a complaint. A good metaphor is that these words are the bricks of the sentence and the "grammar words" are the cement.

But only by default. There is the old "Did I buy flowers for my wife on her birthday?" which can be stressed in at least nine different ways, one for each word in the sentence. Thus the possible change of stress from "bothers" to "me".

Differences between AmE & BrE? Maybe BrE uses more emphasis and some AmE is a bit more flattened out (not always, remember Valley Girls) . Just think how Americans imitate Brits by using more rise and fall. Maybe there is more rising in BrE too. Plus that strange Australian questioning tone is widespread in BrE (Barry: "I'm from Melbourne?" Me: Well you of all people should know that, darlin').

Why I couldn't say, perhaps the influence on AmE of so many other languages with different patterns of stress, timing and emphasis. Certainly where English has been influenced by local languages (such as Indian English, East African English) it seems to have adopted other patterns, so why not a German, Scandinavian Latinate and Asiatic ( for starters) influence on AmE? These and other languages have certainly affected American English vocabulary and maybe even grammar, so it would be plausible to suppose an influence on its pronunciation too.

I'm even less expert on this than on other aspects of English so all the above is pure guesswork (I'm sure I've mixed up stress, emphasis and intonation) and probably fairly obvious to most if not all readers of this forum.

Forty plus people have read this little thread. The teacher part of me thinks it's worth pointing out, to the best of my limited abilities, to these silent witnesses some things that might be obvious to the two other contributors . It also occurs to the student in me that some of these lurkers might be laughing into their sleeves at my naeivity (and at my spelling). Either way they could be helping out a bit with questions or better answers, more likely.

Somebody (Larry?) has made this request at regular intervals but it's worth repeating. Surely this forum would be livened up by more from more than just a handful of contributors. Not knowing what you're talking about is obviously no impediment, certainly not to me or some others!.

Dear Tara B,
I appreciate your help and comments.
My thanks also go to JuanTwoThree.

In Richards' new edition "Interchange," the part at issue has dropped.
Instead, he made himself clear about the usage of his examples in terms of illocutionary acts, by giving a tag of "complaints."

I had wondered what was behind this.

Seiichi MYOGA

This is an interesting way of introducing a comparison:
to contrast with what bothers or is hated by another person

Your use of "what" is not usual. That's why I said it is interesting. Change "what" into "the thing that" or "something that." Then what is to be contrasted is not a person but must be a thing!

It's been said that emphatic stress is only predictable if you can read the speaker's mind.