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Phonetic properties of stress
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Dutch words carry stress. This means that every word has one syllable which in some sense is more important, or more prominent, than any other syllable in the same word. Stress is a culminative property: only one syllable can be the strongest (the prosodic head) within a constituent – such as a word (if the word is a monosyllable, that syllable carries the stress – unless the syllable contains schwa, in which case the word is stressless). Dutch has rules that determine which syllable is stressed. There are various ways in which stress in Dutch is realized phonetically on the word and the sentence level. Stress is realized by specific articulatory efforts and is never marked by a single acoustic property. There are perceptual cues for, and acoustic correlates of, stress. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the two domains.

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