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Updated June 20, 2009
Type 2: Adjective + Noun (never joined when written) – STRESS ON THE SECOND WORD
Introduction
The basic idea is that when you speak a typical adjective + noun combination, such as, "a delicious meal", "an old man", or "a big dog", you do not emphasize the adjective. Instead, you put a type of falling, emphatic tone on the noun to show that the noun is the key word in your statement. This is what I call "putting the key stress on the second word". You will notice that this stress is not the same as the key stress used for the first word in Type 1 combinations.
Number + Noun
Some people mistakenly believe you should stress the number word when you say something such as, "a thousand words" or "a million dollars". The only time when you stress the number should be when you want to contrast that number with another number. Newsreaders sometimes do this when they say (read out) unusually big numbers. For example, "the plane cost one point four billion dollars". The meaning of speaking that way is, "I said, billion, not million". However, just because a number is big does not always mean it should be spoken that way.
Listen to an American (or Canadian) woman say, "A picture paints a thousand words". She speaks this normally, with no special stress on the word, "thousand" but with an emphatic tone on the word, "words".
However, there are three times when you can speak adjective + noun combinations with the heavier stress on the first word, the adjective. When you do that, it sounds similar to the Type 1 stress pattern. The three times when you should do that are:
a) when you want to emphasize the adjective such as in, "It was an amazing experience!" or, "He did an excellent job!"
These are really examples of implied contrast. That is, if you say, "It was an amazing experience!", your meaning is, "It was not just an ordinary experience" and if you say, "He did an excellent job!", your meaning is, "He didn't just do an 'ok' job".
Some people make the mistake of thinking that adjectives that express strong emotions such as, "amazing", "wonderful", "excellent" and "delicious" should always be spoken with strong stress. This is a mistaken idea because you can use those adjectives to describe something using the same intonation that you will hear in the recordings used for other adjective + noun combinations. For example, you can say, "He did an excellent job" using the same intonation as financial year or developing country.
b) when you are directly contrasting two adjectives ( = an explicit contrast), such as: "I've got an old computer but she's got a new one." (IELTS examiners will be looking to see if you know how to make this contrasting stress.)
c) when you are speaking an implicit contrast. When you speak an "implicit contrast" (暗示的对比, 含蓄的对比) you mean, "this adjective, not the opposite adjective", even though you do not explicitly (directly) say this opposite adjective. For example, perhaps two people are discussing a certain political 'problem' in the world and one is talking about military action. Then the second person says, "I'd prefer to find a peaceful solution to the problem." By putting stress on the word, "peaceful", the second speaker means, "not a military solution" but the second speaker did not directly say those words.
There are a few expressions or commonly used adjective + noun combinations that are (almost) always spoken with this implicit contrast stress. Some examples of these are listed on this page:
Type 9: Adjective (implied contrast) + Noun – STRESS ON FIRST WORD
The following is copied from the page, Summary of Stress Pattern Types:
"The stress is on the second word, the noun.
When you listen to these examples, it might seem that sometimes the speaker says the adjective a little louder than the noun. But there is a 'falling tone' on the second word, the noun, that is spoken with an emphasis and clarity that show that the noun is the more important of the two words – the adjective describes that noun, i.e., gives more information about it but the noun is the key word. Listen to these two examples: "an old man" and an "old woman". The stress on the second word here is not as strong as and not the same as the stress on the first word for Type 1 compound nouns such as, "an apple tree" and "decision making".
Many of the examples shown here are common, set expressions that can be found in the dictionary. But the same stress pattern is used for any adjective + noun combination that you might form, such as, "a big dog", "a good student" and, "a pretty girl".
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Lists of Examples (some with links to audio recordings)
(For recordings on the MacMillan Dictionary website, wait
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