These express independent meaning. Content words include nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives, question words, and demonstratives. Content words are usually stressed. These have little or no meaning in themselves, but they express grammatical relationships. Function words include articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns, conjunctions, and relative pronouns.
Function words are usually unstressed unless they are to be given special attention.
While all content words receive major word stress, one content word within a particular sentence will receive greater stress than all the others. This type of emphasis is referred to as the major sentence stress. In most cases, the major sentence stress falls on the last content word within a sentence. In English there is a special relationship between the different parts of a word. In an English word of two or more syllables, one of these will have a stress.