AN ASSESSMENT OF THE USE OF SENTENCE STRESS AMONG UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

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Background of the study

A sentence may be thought of as an anthology of words that together communicate meaning and meaning and are constructed in accordance with the conventional understanding of grammar. When compared to longer and more complicated language, short and clear sentences are almost always deemed to be more effective. It would seem that a sentence is a linguistic unit consisting of one or more words that communicates an independent articulation, such as a question, a request, a summons, a scream, etc., and that typically contains both a subject and a predicate. However, a sentence will almost always start with a capital letter and end with the appropriate punctuation; when spoken, it will display patterns of intonation that are easy to understand and are not constrained in any way, and it will be repeatedly marked by the pauses that came before and after it. In general, declarations and queries about the overwhelming majority of sentences need a subject and a verb that are structured independently, followed by what is known as an independent clause: for instance, he took the phone is a sentence. It's no longer a sentence once you hit the phone; instead, it's a dependent clause in its new role as a replacement. Even though there is a subject and a verb associated with him, he still has to be related to something in order for the sentence to be complete. For example, "He answered a call after picking up the phone," or "He answered a call after picking up the phone" (Hartmann , 2022).

It is essential that we recognize the fact that the sentences provide us with the structure that is required for a comprehensible written sentence. Having strong writing abilities, on the other hand, is absolutely necessary for both academic and professional success. An experience of writing that is complicated and difficult may be transformed into one that is more creative, thrilling, and gratifying if the writer have the skill to write clearly and properly. Learning new phrases is, to put it in a more straightforward manner, one of the most significant strategies to increase your ability to write in English. On the other hand, the construction of writing involves arranging sentences in such a manner that they make sense when read in sequence. If a single phrase is read aloud, the sentence has to be explicable, and paying some attention to the mechanics of sentence construction may make a significant impact in the quality of your work (James , 2022). Generally speaking, sentences are made up of clauses, which are groups of words that represent a single notion. As a result of this, there are two different kinds of clauses, namely independent clauses and dependent clauses.

In point of fact, independent clauses can stand on their own as complete sentences, whereas dependent clauses require the addition of an independent clause in order for their meaning to be fully conveyed. As a result, different types of sentences are constructed using a variety of different combinations of the two types of clauses.

Simple sentences are those that only have one clause that can stand on its own, and they only need one period at the conclusion (a full stop, exclamation or question mark).

Compound sentencesare produced by fusing basic sentences. This means that sentences that are closely related to one another in terms of their substance have been connected together to help the text flow better.

When an independent clause and a dependent clause are combined into a single phrase, the result is a complex statement. The dependent clause in the following example is written in italics for clarity.

Sentence stress, on the other hand, comes into play whenever one has to emphasize a certain fact or point in a text. There are more than a few methods to concentrate the attention of the reader or listener on whatever it is that one wishes to highlight.

Imperatively, the arrangement of words: the author compels the reader to pay attention to a particular word by putting that word at the beginning of a sentence for the reason that, for that reason, placing an introductory word at the beginning of a sentence makes the reader alert for the rest of the sentence. There is no denying that the English language contains an enormous amount of homographic vocabulary; however, this linguistic fact frequently leads to phonological and lexical ambiguities as well as delays in lexical and pronunciation decisions by L2 readers, particularly those who are unable to investigate contextual clues in the process of pronouncing the words, and "improper" or "incorrect" pronunciation of some English words, primarily the homographic ones, while reading or writing in the language. Notably, earlier researchers who have worked on this observable fact have based their studies on inter-lingual factors associated with some sociolinguistic chemistry of languages in contact. This contact circumstance has given birth to many world Englishes, and it is important to note that these studies have been based on these factors ( James, 2022, Pacht, 2022). Pacht (2022) and Palmer,(2022) have identified the impact of spelling on the pronunciation of speakers of English, and Palmer (2022) has identified the supra-segmental as the 'unlearn-able' aspect of English in an L2 context. But further than these inter-lingual circumstances, there are some intricacies inbuilt in English that pose pronunciation challenges to speakers of the language generally and second language (L2) users in particular. For example, there are some intricacies in However, aside from these issues with English orthography and supra-segmental features, there is a problem that is posed by homographic words to speakers of English in general and to speakers of English as a second language in particular. The reasons for this are numerous due to the fact that English homographic words are words that have the same spelling but have double or different pronunciations. This duality of elocution, however, when repeated over and over again leads to something that Palmer and 2022 refer to as lexical ambiguity. For instance, the present tense of the word "read" is pronounced "r: d," but the past tense of the same word is pronounced "red."

Uncertainty is a phenomenon that occurs in human languages, including English, and wherever it does occur, it calls for more than one denotation. This is because uncertainty manifests itself at the phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of language, and the outcome at each of these levels is communication failure or miscommunication. In other words, meaning is obscured, and when this occurs, defective communication results. It is clear that establishing the connection between orthography and phonology, on the one hand, and phonology and significance, on the other, is of the utmost significance at this moment in time. Hartmann et al. (2022) express the viewpoint that there may be a degree of fuzziness in the link between the orthographic and phonological kinds of a word or between the phonological structure and the semantic representation of the word. Because both phonology and semantics contribute to the representation of meaning, phonology and semantics should be unified for this purpose. A lexical passage is the representation of a word's phonological structure, while a word is a phonological structure. In addition to this, each homographic word is split up into two distinct sections with the intention of achieving a certain semantic end goal. In any event, English does not have a visual signal of any kind (the way other tonal dialects have), which would allow it to differentiate between these homographic terms and the many ways that they may be spoken. Because of this, there is usually confusion over the meaning. On the other hand, the purpose of this study is to investigate, on an empirical level, the difficulties that are presented by English homographic words to some students at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, with the goal of determining the effect that these difficulties have on communication among Nigerian undergraduates.

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