Around two months ago, I attended a workshop conducted by a native American English speaker. At a point in her presentation, on seeing a piece of clothing on the floor, she addressed one of the attendees and said to her "Your jacket fell". You might think that this detail might be as inconsequential as not to be written about in a blog post. However, as some of you may remember, I'm mad keen on phonetics and am all the time paying attention to this aspect of (the English and Spanish) languages. An this is what I did. I paid particular attention to where the tonic was in that chunk of speech (=tone unit) she pronounced.
These types of utterances have been described as event sentences, in which the verb is normally intransitive. The tonic syllable is typically placed on the noun and not on the verb, even though the verb is a content word. As J. C. Wells states in English Intonation: An introduction on p. 175, "One possible explanation [for this pattern] is that the verb (or adjective) in an event sentence is predictable from the context, so does not need to be in focus". So the right pattern (and the one the presenter used) is
//Your ˈjacket fell//
In class, we've given some other examples, such as
//The ˈphone's ringing//
//The ˈbaby's crying//
//The ˈwindow's open//
//I have a ˈwedding coming up//
//The ˈzip's broken//
Have you heard any other such utterances to share with us?
Below are the examples you have mentioned in your comments
//The ˈsystem's crashed//
//The aˈlarm went off//
//The ˈpaper came off//
//The ˈair comes out//
//The ˈdinner's ready//
