1. Phonetics, Pronunciation, Stress and Accent

2. Phonetics (pronounced /fəˈnɛtɪks/, from the Greek: φωνή, phōnē, 'sound, voice') is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign.[1] It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status. Phonology, on the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, grammatical characterization of systems of sounds or signs.
The field of phonetics is a multilayered subject of linguistics that focuses on speech. In the case of oral languages there are three basic areas of study:
Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds by the articulatory and vocal tract by the speaker.
Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical transmission of speech sounds from the speaker to the listener.
Auditory phonetics: the study of the reception and perception of speech sounds by the listener.
These areas are inter-connected through the common mechanism of sound, such as wavelength (pitch), amplitude, and harmonics.

3. A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).
Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.
Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".[1]
A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and[s], pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

4. Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features:
The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or approximant (vowel-like) sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals.
The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places includebilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). In addition, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation.
The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is calledvoiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it is voiceless.
The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature of VOT.
The airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most languages have exclusively pulmonic egressiveconsonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but ejectives, clicks, and implosives use different mechanisms.
The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline distinctive in English, as in "wholly" [hoʊlli] vs. "holy" [hoʊli], but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries. Unrelated roots are differentiated in various languages such as Italian, Japanese, and Finnish, with two length levels, "single" and "geminate". Estonian and some Sami languages have three phonemic lengths: short, geminate, and long geminate, although the distinction between the geminate and overlong geminate includes suprasegmental features.
The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated.
All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" [t]. In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted.

5. In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as an English ah! /ɑː/ or oh! /oʊ/, pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel.
In all oral languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages that have them) coda. Some languages also allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic l in the English word table [ˈtʰeɪ.bl̩] (the stroke under the lindicates that it is syllabic; the dot separates syllables)—which, nevertheless, many still consider to have a weak vowel sound [ˈtʰeɪ.bəl]—or the r inCroatian or Serbian vrt [vr̩t], meaning "garden".
A vowel sound whose quality doesn't change over the duration of the vowel is called a monophthong. Monophthongs are sometimes called "pure" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides successively through three qualities is a triphthong.

6. Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that's easiest to sing), called the syllabic peak ornucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the onset and coda) are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages.
Pronunciation is the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect.
A word can be spoken in different ways by various individuals or groups, depending on many factors, such as: the duration of the cultural exposure of their childhood, the location of their current residence, speech or voice disorders, their ethnic group, their social class, or their education.
Linguistic terminology
Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language. The branch of linguistics which studies these units of sound is phonetics. Phones which play the same role are grouped together into classes called phonemes; the study of these is phonemics or phonematics or phonology. Phones as components of articulation are usually described using the International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA).

7. In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. Stress is typically signaled by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch. The termsstress and accent are often used synonymously, but they are sometimes distinguished, with certain specific kinds of prominence (such as pitch accent, variously defined) being considered to fall under accent but not under stress. In this case, stress specifically may be called stress accent or dynamic accent.
The stress placed on syllables within words is called word stress or lexical stress. Some languages have fixed stress, meaning that the stress on virtually any multisyllable word falls on a particular syllable, such as the first or the penultimate. Other languages, like English, have variable stress, where the position of stress in a word is not predictable in that way. Sometimes more than one level of stress, such as primary stress andsecondary stress, may be identified. However, some languages are considered to lack lexical stress entirely.
The stress placed on words within sentences is called sentence stress or prosodic stress. This is one of the three components of prosody, along with rhythm and intonation. It includes phrasal stress (the default emphasis of certain words within phrases or clauses), and contrastive stress (used to highlight an item − a word, or occasionally just part of a word − that is given particular focus).
In sociolinguistics, an accent (/ˈæksɨnt/ or /-ɛnt/) is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.[1] An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).[2]

8. Some languages are described as having both primary stress and secondary stress. A syllable with secondary stress is stressed relative to unstressed syllables, but not as strongly as a syllable with primary stress. As with primary stress, the position of secondary stress may be more or less predictable depending on language. In English it is not fully predictable; for example, the words organization and accumulation both have primary stress on the fourth syllable, but the secondary stress comes on
Accent (/ˈæk.sənt, ˈæk.sɛnt/) is the phonetic prominence given to a particular syllable in a word, or to a particular word within a phrase. When this prominence is produced through greater dynamic force, typically signaled by a combination of amplitude (volume), syllable or vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and a non-distinctive change inpitch, the result is called stress accent, dynamic accent, or simply stress. When it is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent (although this term is often used with a somewhat different meaning; see below). When it is produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent.[1] English has stress accent.
A prominent syllable or word is said to be accented or tonic; the latter term does not imply that it carries phonemic tone. Other syllables or words are said to be unaccented oratonic. Syllables are frequently said to be in pretonic or post-tonic position; certain phonological rules apply specifically to such positions. For instance, in American English, /t/ and /d/ are flapped in post-tonic position.
In some languages, accented syllables have the typical features of stress accent as listed above, except that the change in pitch on such syllables may be distinctive; that is, an accented syllable may carry more than one possible tone (and differences in tone sometimes distinguish words), whereas unaccented syllables do not carry tone. An example of this is Serbo-Croatian accent. The term pitch accent is frequently used to denote accent systems of this type (in spite of inconsistency with the definition of this term given above)
.the first syllable in the former word and on the second syllable in the latter.

9. In linguistics, intonation is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words; instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signalling the difference between statements and questions, and between different types of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation in some languages does distinguish words, either lexically or grammatically. (The term tone is used by some British writers in their descriptions of intonation, but this is to refer to the pitch movement found on the nucleus or tonic syllable in an intonation unit – see Intonation in English: British Analyses of English Intonation, below).
Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, it is important to be aware that functions attributed to intonation such as the expression of attitudes and emotions, or highlighting aspects of grammatical structure, almost always involve concomitant variation in otherprosodic features. Crystal[1] for example says that "...intonation is not a single system of contours and levels, but the product of the interaction of features from different prosodic systems – tone, pitch-range, loudness, rhythmicality and tempo in particular.“

10. Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need to be explained in the context of what is being described. However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article. Global rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right [↗] and falling left-to-right [↘], respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope:
He found it on the street?[ hiː ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↗ˈˈstɹiːt ‖ ]Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it.
Yes, he found it on the street.[↘ˈjɛs ‖ hi ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↘ˈstɹiːt ‖ ]How did you ever escape?[↗ˈˈhaʊ dɪdjuː | ˈɛvɚ | ə↘ˈˈskeɪp ‖ ]Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question.
In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished:
Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time [↗];
Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time [↘];
Dipping or Fall-rise Intonation falls and then rises [↘↗];
Peaking or Rise-fall Intonation rises and then falls [↗↘].