ENGLISH AS A STRESS-TIMED LANGUAGE

Božena Petrášová (Trnava, Slovakia)

Speech is the ability making people unique. Animals can communicate too but people, as the only living creatures, are able to speak by using words combined to sentences. We communicate with other people daily, either in a spoken or written form of communication. To understand each other, we are supposed to master and use the same code, i.e. the same language. A so-called speech chain includes a sender and a receiver who transmit the information they want to share through a channel.

Whereas verbal communication includes words consisting of speech sounds, i.e. vowels and consonants, non-verbal communication comprises prosodic phenomena (intonation, stress, rhythm), paralinguistic ones (voice qualifiers and qualifications), kinesic aspects (facial movement, eye gaze, eye contact, head movement, hand movement, gestures, posture) and standing features (appearance, clothes, bodily adornment, proxemics, touch) (Pavlík 2000).

All the before-mentioned issues are in the centre of study of linguistic disciplines dealing with language, communication and speech phenomena called phonetics and phonology. We combine speech sounds to words, words to sentences and sentences to an utterance. Speech sounds do not occur as individual segments of speech, they are combined to a continuous stream of sounds, without clear-cut borderlines between them to reach a smooth connected delivery of information. When we speak in such a way, with a minimum number of pauses, we use connected speech. Its aspects are analysed by suprasegmental phonology which is predominantly interested in stress, rhythm and intonation. The other phenomena connected speech implies are linking, strong and weak forms, elision and assimilation.

We encounter rhythm in everyday situations. Our heart beats rhythmically, we breathe rhythmically, quite a lot of events in nature is rhythmical, e.g. seasons or moon phases and alternations of day and night. Rhythm is also present in music, in poetry or in engines of vehicles.

English speech is also rhythmical. Rhythm is closely connected not only with a word stress but also with a sentence stress. In terms of word stress, every word comprises stressed and/or unstressed syllables. Primary (main) stress and secondary (subsidiary) stress have a different degree of prominence. The number of stressed syllables in an utterance depends largely on the nature of words in it. Sentence stress focuses on differentiating lexical and grammatical words. Lexical, i.e. notional words such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs and lexical verbs are stressed, function words, i.e. pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, adverbial particles and determiners are unstressed. Function words are stressed only for specific purposes, mainly when they are used to express emphasis or comparison.

A term rhythm can be explained as alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in speech or as Radoslav Pavlík says, it is “temporal organization of stressed and unstressed syllables in connected speech“ (Pavlík 2010, p.76). According to Alan Cruttenden, “English rhythm has an isochrony based on stresses“ (Cruttenden 1997, p.24). David Crystal also does not understand rhythm as a single problem. This phenomenon is closely connected with “features of pitch, loudness, speed and silence. These are combined to produce the effect known as speech rhythm“ (Crystal 2011, p.249). All these properties form prosodic features of a language.

The English language is a stress-timed one. According to Daniel Jones, “English speech has a rhythm that allows us to divide it up into more or less equal intervals of time called feet, each of which begins with a stressed syllable“ (Jones 2003, p.459). Radoslav Pavlík supports this characteristics. He claims that there is “a tendency towards taking an approximately equal period of time between one stressed syllable and the next“ (Pavlík 2010, p.76) and Peter Roach concludes this problem when he says that “the feet are supposed to be of roughly the same duration“ (Roach 1998, p.123). Peter Roach presents the fact that “some theories of rhythm point to the fact that some feet are stronger than others, producing strong-weak patterns in larger pieces of speech above the level of the foot“ (Roach 1998, p.121). In his example twenty places, the second word of this phrase carries stronger stress, i.e. it is “rhythmically stronger“ (ibid.). David Crystal highlights peculiarities of spontaneous speech in which rhythm is often broken by hesitators interfering with the stream of speech (Crystal 2011). Therefore, when using such a way of pronunciation, we speak arhythmically, i.e. without rhythm whereas on the contrary, in a typical style of public speaking, we have to speak rhythmically (Roach 1998).

The feet (stress-groups) are treated as the smallest rhythmic units. All the syllables of a stress-group are linked together as if they made a single word. Words within rhythmic units are joined together by juncture (a break between sounds usually marking the phonological boundary of a word, clause or sentence).

Languages like e.g. Slovak, in which “the length of each syllable remains more or less the same as that of its neighbours whether or not it is stressed are called syllable-timed“ (Jones 2003, p.459). Stressed syllables in Slovak do not occur regularly at time intervals. The rhythm in Slovak is based on the number and the type of syllables within words and their succession. In Slovak, syllables are treated as short if any of the short vowels a, o, i, e, u, y functions as a syllable nucleus. Long vowels á, é, í, ó, ú, ý and diphthongs ia, ie, iu, ô form peaks of sonority in long syllables. Syllabic consonants /ḷ ṛ ḹ ṝ/ can also function as a centre of syllabicity in Slovak. If these consonants are short, i.e. /ḷ ṛ/, in e.g. prvý /pṛví/, the syllables including short /ḷ ṛ/can be followed by long ones but in the case /ḹ/ or /ṝ/ function as peaks of sonority in long syllables, the following syllable has to be short, e.g. vĺča /vḹča/. In Slovak, according to a so-called rhythmical law, two long syllables cannot go one after another within one word, so a long syllable has to be followed only by a short one. Of course, exceptions to the rhythmical law exist but just a few words with two long neighbouring ǐsyllables occur in Slovak, e.g. lístie /lísťǐe/. In the English language, alternation of short and long syllables is not so strict but in English words which are not borrowed from other languages such tendencies occur.

Stress and rhythm are closely connected. It is possible to say that to a certain degree, stress determines rhythm and rhythm can influence stress. Stress gives an English sentence its characteristic rhythmic pattern.

In poetry, alternation of more and less prominent units form the metrical patterns in lines of verses. Such issues of organising syllables to verses is in the centre of interest of versification. Stressed and unstressed syllables combined to form feet are counted and thus recognized as various kinds of poetic rhythm. David Crystal mentions five syllable types with examples for each of them. Stressed syllables are marked / and for unstressed ones he uses a specific symbol ∪. Thus, as an example for iamb, i.e. iambic foot he uses a word demand ∪/, for trochee or trochaic foot he chooses a word soldier /∪, for spondee or spondaic foot an expression dry dock // is used, dactyl, i.e. dactylic foot is represented by a word elephant /∪∪ and anapest or anapestic foot is demonstrated on a word disbelieve ∪∪/ (Crystal 2011, p.415).

Foreigners often make a mistake in pronouncing all syllables with an equal stress. This can make the utterance sound monotonous or even uncomprehensible. David Crystal speaks about “the most noticeable feature of the English spoken throughout South Asia“ because of its “syllabic rhythm“ and follows the idea that this “can be a source of comprehension difficulty for those used to a stress-timed variety, especially when speech is rapid“ (Crystal 2011, p.360). Different rhythm can thus cause misunderstanding or not understanding a stream of words a speaker produces.

REFERENCES

CRUTTENDEN A. Intonation. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

CRYSTAL D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

JONES D. Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

PAVLÍK R. Phonetics and Phonology. Exercises in English. Bratislava: PdF UK, 2010.

PAVLÍK R. Phonetics and Phonology of English. A Theoretical Introduction. Bratislava: PdF UK, 2000.

ROACH P. English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge University Press, 1998.