If you do not know what the Last Lexical Item Rule (LLI Rule is), watch Part 1 first here. In short, the rule states that in English the main stress falls on the last lexical item in a sentence (or better: a tone unit), unless the speaker wants to change the neutral (= unmarked) meaning of the sentence.

Lexical items are words such as nouns, most verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They carry meaning and are also often called content words. Function words on the other hand are words such as articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, modals, pronouns and conjunctions. They do not carry much meaning but hold the syntax together. That’s why we also often call them grammar words.

In this second video we are going to have a look at exceptions to the Last Lexical Item Rule (LLI). There are 5 exceptions in total: old information (repetitions), synonyms or near-synonyms, context, empty words and contrastive stress. We are going to discuss each exception in detail using plenty of examples.

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