Chapter Two: SUPRA-SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY

Stress and rhythm

Every language has its own characteristic rhythm. In English rhythm is based on the contrast of stressed and unstressed syl­lables. The rhythm may not be absolute, some 'strokes' (stresses) may be missing and some may be mistimed. But still there is a tendency for the rhythm to be established in speech. The stressed syllables tend to occur at roughly equal intervals of time. The more organized the speech the more rhythmical it will be. Thus, in general, prose read aloud by a fluent reader, has a much more obvious rhythm than conversational speech which may be full of pauses and false starts. Very fluent speakers who can organize their thoughts well in advance of actually ut­tering them also establish a far more obvious rhythm to re­fine a thought while in the middle of expressing it.

So we can say that there is a tendency to establish rhythm. The rhythmic beat will consist of stressed syllables. Any un­stressed syllables occurring between the stressed syllables will be compressed as far as possible in order to allow the next stressed syllable to come in the regular beat. As the stressed syllables are not divided by an equal number of unstressed syllables, the compression of unstressed syllables will be different. And the degree of compression will be highly dependant of their number: the more unstressed syllables occur between the stressed ones the quicker they are pronounced.

Stress, a greater degree of prominence given to a syllable, can be viewed from a perceptible point of view. Accordingly, any syllable on which the pitch of the voice moves (rises or falls) will be stressed; any syllable which is markedly longer than the surrounding syllables will also be stressed. Sometimes stressed syllables are said to be produced with more force than unstressed syllables, but ex­periments show that this basic notion is not enough to state the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables. One valuable guide to distinguish stressed syl­lable from unstressed one is the degree of explicitness of articulation of the syllable. This is the feature of both slow colloquial and informal speech.

The opposition [stressed syllable - unstressed syllable] is the only plausible opposition on a word level. In utterances stressed syllables may possess different degree of syllabic prominence. Utterance stress (or prosodic stress) has far more characteristics than a word stress. Prosodic contrasts between stressed and unstressed syllables on utte­rance level are greater in English than in many other lan­guages. The distribution of stress in an utterance is deter­mined by the interaction of two factors: semantic and rhythmic, which represent the functional and formal aspects of an ut­terance, respectively. Semantically, the occurrence of stresses in any given utterance varies according to the context and highly depends on the pragmatic intentions the speaker has. Rhythmically, the distribution of stresses in an utterance may involve even grammatical words into the rhythmic patterning; grammatical words having no semantic value in themselves. Cf.:

Is 'Mary here?

'Is she ِhere?

The location of nuclear stress in an utterance is not entirely semantically based but very often determined by rhythmic factors. Cf.:

And 'finally she 'bought the thing she wanted.

The nuclear stress in an English utterance has a tendency to appear in final stressed position. If the nuclear stress is shifted to the preceding stressed syllables the final position in an utte­rance still possesses some kind of prominence, thus, giving it to the syllable/syllables following the nuclear stress. Cf.:

He kept it all the time instead of givingit to her.

Basically, all stressed syllables in an utterance are not perceived as equally prominent. Stressed syllables which are produced with moving pitch or high pitch will be perceived as more prominent in general than stressed syllables pro­duced on mid or low pitch. The same difference occurs when we consider the distribution of a stressed syllable in an utterance. The prominence of a stressed syllable to a higher extent depends on the part of an utterance the stressed syl­lable occurs, i.e. if it functions in pre-tonic or post-to­nic position. We may attribute such variation in perceived prominence partially to the effect of the intonation of the utterance in which the syllable occurs, and partially to the rhythmic patterning.

Formally, there may exist rhythmic patterns with-2, 3, 4, 5 and even 6 stressed syllables fully pronounced. The 5-and 6-stress pattern mainly occur in reading, where the beat is more regular. In speech 2- or 3-stress pattern is considered to be more effective and less obscure for the speaker as well as for the listener who interprets the message. It may be objected that we have no way of knowing that the na­tive speaker relies especially on hearing the stressed words in an utterance in order to be able to interpret it. But we may find proof in the behaviour of young children. It is com­mon knowledge that young children having to speak produce sentences containing only nouns, verbs and adjectives. Another indication of the native speaker’s instinctive reliance on the importance of stressed words can be seen in the behaviour of someone speaking over a noisy telephone wire: he shouts word groups with correct stresses and pronounces stressed syllables especially loudly and clearly. And thus, unstressed syllables form a frame in which the stressed syllables fit.

Rhythm in English is not just something extra added to intonation and pronunciation of vowels and consonants, but it is the guide to the structure of intonation in the spoken message. It is a code (or a key) for listener's adequate in­terpretation of spoken utterances, and it is given by the speaker himself. The rhythmic patterning reveals the speaker’s attitude towards what he is saying, towards the facts he is transmitting to the listeners. This explains the fact why different readers read differently the given text, and why speakers pronounce one and the same utterance in their own ways, with their own indivi­dual rhythm.

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