Are there any rules to emphasize certain words in English sentences?
Native speaker’s answer
Rebecca
In written English emphasis can be done by word or clause placement. When you want to emphasize key facts and phrases, using introductory adverbs and adverb phrases can be very effective. Some examples of these are "especially", "particularly", etc. Other adverbs work well in the introductory position too. In spoken English there are even more options. English is a "stress-timed language" that has a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables and words. You change stress to emphasize, give new information, contrast information or to clarify. In other words, English lets you put the stress on different words (or parts of words) to change the meaning of the whole sentence. You can make some information more important than the rest of the sentence through sentence stress. Ex: I'm sorry the class is full. => This sentence without any particular stress is like a kind of like you feel and for the person Ex: I'm SOrry, the CLASS is FULL. => If you stress the capitals it sounds a little angry and puts more emphasis
