English, Pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and sentence stress?

Question

How can I follow the English rhythm, and how do I know it? I don't understand that part at all. All I know is that I should stress content words-Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs and pronouns-but how to keep the rhythm. I record myself but I don't feel that I sound like a native.

Another question, when I stress a word, I know that I should make it higher in pitch and longer in duration, but does that rule apply also on the last word of the sentence? Because I always hear/read that Americans go down in pitch at the end of the sentence.
Please help explain that rhythm thing to me. It's too confusing and hard for me to grasp it as an ESL.

Thanks,
Appreciated.

Raindoctor · Accepted Answer

A syllable gets stressed; a syllable can also get accented. Often times, a syllable gets both the stress and accent. Yet other times, a non-stressed syallble gets accented. Of course, you see many stressed syllables without the accent in an intonational phrase (this is obvious, of course).

When you pronounce a word alone, yes, you hear both accent and stress. However, in an intonational phrase, as you can hear when people speak from the syllable after a pause to the syllable before the next pause, you usually see a syllable in the last word getting accented.

Dwight Bolinger in his books on intonation discussed the difference between pitch and accent (or stress and accent). Books on discourse intonation treat it differently: citation pronunciations, which you hear in dictionaries; and context pronunciations, which you hear in a discourse. Dictionary pronunciations are worthless when it comes to spoken speech as opposed to lexical/citation speech.

English, Pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and sentence stress?

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