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speech. Word-stress, or accent in its usual sense, needs
no further definition. By sentence-stress is meant an accent
resting on one or more words of a spoken sentence, or more
exactly still on one or more syllables of the breath-groups,
§ 212, into which speech naturally divides itself. The
importance of recognizing sentence-stress, as well as word-
stress, depends upon the fact that the unstressed words of
a breath-group, like the unstressed syllables of a word, may
undergo special changes. Accent may be of different kinds
in respect to quality, as pitch or musical accent, and force or
expiratory accent. Both of these may, and usually do,
unite to some extent in a particular language, but one is
always more prominent and characteristic. Musical accent
belonged, for example, to classical Greek and to Sanskrit;
expiratory accent is exemplified by classical Latin and Teu-
tonic. Musical accent has its various grades represented
by the acute, the grave, and the circumflex. Expiratory
accent is also of two kinds called primary and secondary
according to the degree of force employed. As to posi-
tion accent is free, resting on any syllable and moving from
one syllable to another in the inflectional forms of the same
word; or fixed, resting always on the same syllable of the
word. Free accent belonged to the Indo-European and
was retained in Sanskrit, Greek, and in the earliest Teutonic.
On the other hand the accent of Teutonic words, after
the earliest period, was a fixed, expiratory stress as already
described, § 32. Between the two stands the Latin accent,
which must rest on one of two syllables in polysyllabic words,
but may change from one to the other in inflection, as in
léo--leÓnis, féci--fecïsti. English sentence-stress is also an

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Publication Information: Book Title: The History of the English Language. Contributors: Oliver Farrar Emerson - author. Publisher: Macmillan. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1894. Page Number: 256.
    
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