The article deals with the question of varying the word order and sentence stress in English. Special attention is paid to the functioning of the language. It is emphasized that the main function of language is communicative. Segmental and suprasegmental elements of the language are discussed. It is noted that word order and sentence stress are suprasegmental units that affect the change in the meaning of identical English utterances. In the article, based on the consideration of proposals from the work of M. Hannay, the results of the influence of varying word order on the meaning of statements consisting of identical words are shown. It is stated that the fixed word order in English speech is compensated by the possibilities of sentence stress. The components of intonation are described. The definition of sentence stress is given. The research is conducted by looking at issues such as why English sentence stress in a sentence is important for pronunciation. The criteria for stressing words with sentence stress are set. The article describes the degrees of sentence stress. It is noted that the main sentence stress, highlighting the information center of syntagma, makes a great contribution to the formation of the meaning of the statement. Acoustic correlates of sentence stress are shown. Using identical statements, the author describes the effect of sentence stress. The meanings of identical sentences with different sentence stresses are considered and revealed. Based on the phonetic analysis of examples, the article presents the author’s development of the melodic contour of several sentences and shows the different melodic structure of identical utterances. The main attention is paid to the meanings of identical utterances under the influence of English sentence stress. The paper also analyses examples of identical utterances with different sentence stresses given by various leading linguists-phoneticians. The melodic contour of these utterances is revealed and the meanings of these utterances are considered in detail. The paper reflects the development of the problem of the meaning of sentence stress for pronunciation. In conclusion, the article states that the meaning of a statement in speech is a product of both what is said and how it is said. Speakers implement their own changes to the parameters of the same sentence to convey their specific intentions.