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 senten...