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With polysyllabic words, things are a bit trickier.

So in a sentence like "The cat sat on the mat and played with the rat": Articles, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are not.Nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs, negations, and interjections are stressed.The syllables that are emphasized in everyday spoken English, and therefore in English poetry, are fairly predictable grammatically. So when we say that a line is iambic pentameter, we're saying that the line has five stressed syllables, each preceded by an unstressed syllable. That is, English meter is determined by how the accents (stresses) are distributed over the entire set of syllables in a given line. Specifically with regard to poetic meter, this accentual-syllabic nature of English means that to scan a line and identify its metrical pattern, one counts two things: the accents and the syllables. What native English speakers discern as "a foreign accent" derives from non-native stress patterns being applied to English about as equally as from mispronunciation of phonemes per se. For example, French tends to emphasize the last syllable of words and phrases Indian languages lack stress within words entirely, relying instead on a sing-song stress pattern within phrases. Other languages have other stress patterns that feel equally natural to speakers of those languages. It is, of course, no such thing different languages have different stress patterns, and what seems natural is just convention, in the same way that grammar is. Native speakers tend to think of this pattern as "natural". This holds true regardless of whether said sequence comprises:Īll spoken English exhibits this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

When any sequence of English words is spoken or read out loud, certain syllables are accentuated (emphasized) by being spoken relatively louder and/or being articulated more distinctly, while others are unstressed by being spoken relatively softer and/or slurred. But if you're not confident of your ear, there are certain techniques you can use to help you identify how a line scans.įirst, it's necessary to understand how stress works in English. As the comments to your question have noted, the most reliable way to figure out whether a given line is iambic pentameter is to sound it out.