A few (4) decades ago, in my first TESL course as an undergrad, we had a sentence something like the following, where the "point" was to show students that, in principle, any word in a sentence could be the location of the primary sentence stress, depending on the context and what had preceded in the conversation or story:
My friend and I drove to the party in a rented, blue Ford station wagon.
In our practicum, one of the assignments was, in fact, to have students repeat the sentence any number of times, even up to 15 in that case, where any word could be the focal or contrastive stress location. (You may have done something similar.) What that accomplished, in addition to massive confusion, is still not clear! In the unmaked condition, where that sentence somehow begins the conversation, on basic parsing would probably be:
My friend and I / drove to the party / in a rented, / blue Ford station wagon.
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To the native speaker, or near-native, that unmarked parsing is probably the concensus, and relatively easy to land on. Not so, generally, for the nonnative, however, in part because the decision as to where to parse the text relied on grammatical and discourse competence, not simply on how it "felt" to say it. (In fact, I have found many native-speaking teacher trainees to be even less successful at producing the unmarked version of the text. They have been generally highly auditory and weak on grammar!)
Once the "story" and previous preconceptions or events kick in, the stress could shift in any number of ways. There are some rules for guessing at the unmarked, of course, but they are not very helpful, such as:
- Stress tends to fall:
- on content words
- to the right
- on nouns or verbs, but not on prepositions, articles, adjectives or adverbs
- important concepts introduced earlier in the narrative that are contrastive to what is expected on marked constituents (context or previous events based)
So, how does one whose L1 is not English, learn how to parse texts for students, as is the basis of the "Rhythm First" protocol of the KINETIK method, where you parse the text and identify the primary-stressed word in each parse (or rhythm) group. Good question. One way is to take the KINETIK Method Instructor Certificate Course (KMICC) where each week you work on various short texts learning how to effectively parse to the intrinsic rhythm of the written (or spoken) text. At the conclusion of the 10-week course, participants are very good at parsing texts into what we call "embodied oral readings (EORs)," the key building block of the haptic, KINETIK instructional system.
That sound like / a very good tool / to have on hand?
Or
That sound / like a very good tool / to have on hand?
or
That sound like a very good tool/ to have on hand?
If so, join us: actonhaptic.com/kinetik or email me directly at: wracton@gmail.com
