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Read the following extracts from Russian and foreign phoneticians and dwell on the difference in the points of view on the problem.Date: 2015-10-07; view: 554. Further Theoretical Background
1. …it is as if there were a conspiracy in English to maintain a regular rhtythm. However, this conspiracy is not strong enough to completely override the irrefgularities caused by variations un the nmber and type of unstressed syllables. In a sentence schn as The red bird flew speedily home the interval between the first and secon dstresses will be far less than between the third and fourth. Stresses tend to occur at regular intervals. But the sond pattern of English does not make this an overriding necessity, ajdusting the length of syllables so as to enforce complete reglarity. The interval between stresses is affected by the number of syllables within the stress group and by the number and type of vowels and consonants within each syllable. Ladedfoged P. A Course in Phonetics. LA, 1975, p 110 2. An essential feature of connected speech is that the peaks of prominence - the stressed syllables - are inseparably connected with non-prominent syllables. The latter are attached to the stressed syllables, they never exist by themselves: a monosyllabic utterance, e.g.: 'Yes. 'No. 'Here., is always an utterance formed by a stressed syllable. The simplest example of a close relationship between the stressed and unstressed syllables is a polysyllabic word-utterance which is a phonetic and semantic entity incapable of division, e.g.: 'Excellent. To'morrow. ''Certainly. Thus an utterance is split into groups of syllables unified by a stressed syllable, i.e. stress-groups, each of which is a semantic unit - generally a word, often more than a word, because stress does not fall on every word in an utterance, and occasionally it is less than a word, considering the possibility of words with two stresses. Within a stress-group composed of one polysyllabic word the unstressed syllables may join the stressed one as either proclitics (preceding it) or enclitics (following it). However, (he status of the unstressed syllables in an utterance is not always clear, particularly, when notional words are interspersed with unstressed function words: 'Peter was 'ready to 'go with us 'tîî. It is natural that the unstressed function words should be attached to the notional (content) word with which they are connected semantically and grammatically, and «difference between proclitics and enclitics, then, is predetermined by these criteria, Consequently, unless we assume that the semantic and grammatical links between words are manifested phonetically and, namely, prosodically, the discrimination of proclitics and enclitics would be unnecessary. The given assumption has been supported by experimental evidence, particularly, concerning the speed of utterance: proclitics appear to be considerably faster in pronunciation than enclitics. This difference can only be observed by comparing the speed of utterance in the prehead and in the tail of the intonation-group, which are the most obvious and doubtless examples of proclitics and enclitics, respectively: We could 'go from 'Manchester. Now 'here's the 'weather 'forecast. An important feature of English pronunciation is that the prominent syllables in an utterance occur at approximately equal periods of time. When an utterance consists of stressed syllables only, this peculiarity implies more or less the same length of each stressed syllable in an utterance: 'Don't 'go 'now. 'Two 'days 'long. When there are unstressed syllables between the stressed ones it means equal time for each of the stressed groups: I'd 'like to 'give you a 'piece of ad'vice. I sup'pose the 'best thing is to 'try 'later. It must be understood that this isochrony is relative, not absolute: the actual physical duration of adjacent stress-groups in an utterance is but rarely equal; however, on a perceptible level stresses appear to occur more or less regularly. This impression is largely based on the instability of syllable duration in speech: when the number of syllables in adjacent stress-groups is not equal, the speed of utterance will be the highest in the group having the largest number of syllables and, vice versa, the tempo is noticeably slower in a group having fewer syllables. Thus the perceptible isochrony of stress-groups is based on the speakers tending to minimize the differences in the length of stressed groups in an utterance. In other words, the peculiar feature of English speech - regularity of stresses - is rather an underlying tendency than its actual characteristic. The above-mentioned compression of syllable duration, on the one hand, its lengthening, on the other, are manifested in speech in different ways: the former is more typical of unstressed syllables, while the latter is more frequently realised on the stressed ones: unstressed syllables are normally shorter than the stressed ones and this normal relationship would be destroyed if unstressed syllables were made to sound noticeably longer and the stressed syllables noticeably shorter than usual, whereas lengthening of stressed syllables and shortening of the unstressed ones only emphasizes the existing kind of relationship between them. Thus it has been shown that stress in English performs, besides semanic, an important function of ‘organizing' an utterance, providing the basis for its rhythmic structure which is the realization of rhó thm as a prosodic feature of speech. Rhythm is defined in different languages in largely the same terms. The notionof the rhythm implies, first of all, a certain periodicity of phonological events. For an English utterance these events, as has been made clear, are the stressed syllables. Periodicity does not necessarily mean equality of time intervals between certain phenomena. However, such an equality, relative as it may be, is a peculiarity of English. English speech is therefore often described as more 'rhythmic' than, for example, Russian (the term 'rhythmic' here is used in the sense of 'isochronous'). It follows from the above discussion that the units of the rhythmic organization of an utterance are stress-groups which, for that matter, may be just as well called rhythmic groups. Since the effect of isochrony is based primarily on the perception of peaks of prominence as more or less regular beats, the boundaries between rhythmic groups are often associated with the stressed syllables. Such a ‘formal' approach has proved rather convenient for practical purposes, as it helps to keep regular time intervals between the stressed syllables. Yet, this kind of rhythmic division has some weak points. The main drawback is that all unstressed syllables are treated as enclitics. And this may in some cases lead to semantic distortions because the prosodic junctures between different meaningful units within an utterance are displaced: He was 'laughing at | 'everything. He was 'laughed at | 'everywhere. As is seen from the first example, the formal rhythmic boundary is in conflict with the meaning of the utterance, according to which it should be divided into the following rhythmic groups: He was 'laughing | at 'everything. There seem to be two principles operating in speech simultaneously: keeping more or less regular time intervals between stresses, on the one hand, and marking the semantic links between unstressed and stressed syllables, on the other. The learner's acquisition of correct English rhythmic patterns depends on his ability to control both these factors in connected speech.
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