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here are four sentences. I mark the words that I believe are stressed with bold.
Did I apply the stress correctly? The last content word gets the most stress.Right? If yes, my question is this: is it necessary to apply some stress to the verb "call" or just stress the last content words? The verb is also a content word.
When the preposition in a phrasal verb has no noun complement afterwards it is usually stressed:
For this reason all the instances of back in the Original Poster's example will probably be stressed. As the Original Poster has indicated lexical verbs will usually also take stress, but auxiliaries usually won't unless in a negative contraction. An exception to this is when they occur at the end of the sentence, when they will often be stressed. This is why can is stressed in sentence (4). Adverbs usually take stress, so the adverb soon is likely to be stressed. The quantifiers many and few also usually take stress too. Because of this we would expect the following stress patterns:
