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From what I learned through reading, all auxiliaries are unstressed. What about certain conjunctions? It sounds like "as" is unstressed, but are "since" and "when" stressed? In thinking about this, I am having some difficulty. Please help.

I think that often my ear is weak.

garbia
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    You can stress a lot of words, including auxiliaries, if you want to put emphasis on them. I'd say "since" and "when" are usually not stressed, but when they are stressed, or when they are stressed, it'll be for emphasis. –  Jun 20 '22 at 09:04
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    Stresses are about speech. Any 'rules' you've read about are an attempt to understand how spoken language sounds, but those 'rules' don't impose back onto how people actually speak. Since your questions are often about poetic meter, you'll need to accept that some readers will mentally pronounce and stress different syllables in their heads as they read – often re-stressing after comprehending the full sentence. Punctuation and line-breaks can force a rhythm (awkwardly), but grammar alone can't suggest a rhythm until the full sentence (and larger context) has been understood. – wetcircuit Jun 20 '22 at 14:12
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    Exactly. Writers have to figure out ways to represent the sound of English speech, since English orthography does a piss-poor job of it. And since English is stress-timed, phrases hafta fit into the stress and intonation. – jlawler Jun 20 '22 at 21:32

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