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    Stress and Rhythm

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    Carmen Elizabeth
    The document discusses stress, rhythm, and intonation in speech. It states that these elements are closely connected and form what can be called "speech flow". When speaking, it is important to set sounds in the right motion to be understood, similar to how notes are set to music. A good speech flow is more important for intelligibility than perfectly pronouncing individual sounds. The document also discusses sentence stress, noting that content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives are normally stressed, while function words are usually unstressed. It provides examples of sentences with many stresses taking less time to say than ones with few stresses, as unstressed words are spoken more quickly between stressed syllables. Developing a smooth

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    Stress and Rhythm

    Uploaded by

    Carmen Elizabeth
    19 views2 pages
    The document discusses stress, rhythm, and intonation in speech. It states that these elements are closely connected and form what can be called "speech flow". When speaking, it is important to set sounds in the right motion to be understood, similar to how notes are set to music. A good speech flow is more important for intelligibility than perfectly pronouncing individual sounds. The document also discusses sentence stress, noting that content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives are normally stressed, while function words are usually unstressed. It provides examples of sentences with many stresses taking less time to say than ones with few stresses, as unstressed words are spoken more quickly between stressed syllables. Developing a smooth

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    phonology 2

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    STRESS AND RHYTHM

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    The document discusses stress, rhythm, and intonation in speech. It states that these elements are closely connected and form what can be called "speech flow". When speaking, it is important to set sounds in the right motion to be understood, similar to how notes are set to music. A good speech flow is more important for intelligibility than perfectly pronouncing individual sounds. The document also discusses sentence stress, noting that content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives are normally stressed, while function words are usually unstressed. It provides examples of sentences with many stresses taking less time to say than ones with few stresses, as unstressed words are spoken more quickly between stressed syllables. Developing a smooth

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    19 views2 pages

    Stress and Rhythm

    Uploaded by

    Carmen Elizabeth
    The document discusses stress, rhythm, and intonation in speech. It states that these elements are closely connected and form what can be called "speech flow". When speaking, it is important to set sounds in the right motion to be understood, similar to how notes are set to music. A good speech flow is more important for intelligibility than perfectly pronouncing individual sounds. The document also discusses sentence stress, noting that content words like nouns, verbs, adjectives are normally stressed, while function words are usually unstressed. It provides examples of sentences with many stresses taking less time to say than ones with few stresses, as unstressed words are spoken more quickly between stressed syllables. Developing a smooth

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    STRESS AND RHYTHM

    Stress; rhythm and intonation should be considered as a whole, for they are very

    closely connected elements of a single aspect of the language that we might call

    SPEECH FLOW. Speech is essentially movement. However accurate we learn to

    pronounce the isolated sounds of a language we must still train ourselves to set them

    in motion in the right manner if we wish to make ourselves easily understood. Spoken

    language behaves like music. The sounds of English and isolated syllables, like notes

    or chords in music, only become intelligible when set in motion.

    A reasonably speech flow (when being correct) is more important for intelligibility

    than correct sounds. It is possible to carry on an intelligible English conversation in a

    series of mumbles and grunts, provided the voice - movement is correct. Some

    foreign speakers of English, even though they learn to make English sounds quite

    well, fail to acquire a sufficiently accurate speech flow. The result is that English

    speaking people find it quite difficult to understand them; and they, for their part,

    complain that English people mispronounce or swallow half their words.

    SENTENCE STRESS

    It can be generally assumed that in any normal sentence we shall stress (or give full

    sound value to the significant words only. These content words are briefly:

    1) Nouns (and some pronouns, notably interrogatives)

    2) Demonstratives (this, that, etc.)

    3) Adjectives

    4) Most adverbs.

    5) Verbs (and auxiliaries in certain circumstances)

    The other words in a sentence, mostly form - words to join together the words that
    carry meaning, are normally unstressed, many of them carrying special weak forms.

    The syllables bearing stress proceed at a fairly regular pace; the unstressed syllables

    being accommodated between them in varying rhythmic sequences. The latter

    provide one of the greatest difficulties for the foreign student, who generally tries to

    give them a fuller pronunciation than is due to them.

    We can see this most clearly by comparing sentences with many significant words and

    therefore many stresses) with sentences consisting mainly of form - words (and

    therefore of few stresses). Consider the following four sentences: the first and second

    have 11 and 12 words respectively 10 of them being stressed; the third and fourth

    have 14 and 16 words respectively with only 4 actresses each. Yet, the longer

    sentences take only half the time to say that the shorter ones take. The unstressed

    words, crowded together between the steadily moving pulses, are spoken quite

    quickly compared with the shorter sentences full of stressed syllables.

    1- Bert a friend John has just sold two very fine old paintings.

    2- The Daniel Jones pronouncing Dictionary lists most versions of modern English

    pronunciation.

    3- What would you have done if he had talked to you in the street?

    4- It would have been better not to have paid for it before you had received it.

    The ability to move smoothly and steadily form one stress to the next, and to fit in

    the unstressed syllables between them, forms the basis of a good natural English

    accent.

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