TOPIC 9.
THE ENGLISH PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM
COMPARISON WITH THE CATALAN & SPANISH PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM
CATEGORIES
INTRODUCTION
One of the great characteristics of the human being is the ability to communicate complicated messages about aspects of everyday life.
We exchange this information through visual or auditory stimuli.
From a very young age we learn to respond to the sounds used by adults, and then we imitate the more familiar sound schemes.
This gift for imitation leads us to the gift of the word.
A constant exposure to the spoken language - along with the need to communicate - leads us to learn a language.
Everything seems very natural when we refer to the acquisition of the first language, but when it comes to another language - learned artificially and without any urgent need to communicate - the situation changes quite a bit.
In this artificial context, our students must be able to understand spoken English and also be able to be understood when they speak English. This is where teaching good pronunciation from the beginning of learning a language becomes important.
For years, emphasis has been placed on the communicative aspect of the language, somewhat neglecting the correct reproduction of sounds in the process of learning a foreign language. This has been the case since the communicative method was introduced in the teaching of foreign languages in general, and English in particular. In other words, the emphasis in communication has been more on content, on what is said than on how it is said – pronunciation (of vowels and consonants), stress, rhythm, intonation have often been ignored.
INTRODUCTION
The sounds of English are normally studied one by one. But speech sounds seldom occur in isolation; they are nearly always strung together to form words and sequences of words.
As a matter of fact, students of English realize when hearing native speakers that their final utterances bear little relation to the pronunciation of the same words in isolation.
In FLT there has been a shift in the teaching of phonetics; previously, the emphasis was laid on individual sounds, whereas nowadays the focus is on connected speech. Special attention is being paid to stress, rhythm and intonation since they also convey meaning and this could be an important source for misunderstandings.
Two categories should be clarified from the very outset, for they delimit the field of study of this unit, i.e., segmental and suprasegmental featues. The segmental features, which are referred to as the individual sounds, deal with vowels and consonants. The suprasegmental features, also known as prosodic features, are those which operate over longer stretches of speech, such as, stress, rhythm, intonation, pitch, and voice quality.
SEGMENTAL
SUPRASEGMENTAL
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STRESS
In general terms, when one hears English spoken or read aloud, one realizes that a number of words or syllables stand out from the rest of the sentence.
This standing out may be termed prominence.
Investigations go to show that the effect of prominence is produced by the very intimate combination of the following four elements:
length
stress
pitch
inherent sonority of sounds
WORD STRESS
SENTENCE STRESS
As indicated above, in English, as in many other languages, words have a syllable that is pronounced with more force and intensity: in the word cinema /ˈsɪn.ə.mə/ is the first, in the word hotel /həʊˈtel/ is the second.
This syllable, more prominent than the others is called the tonic syllable, accented or strong (stressed syllable) because it contains an accent that occurs with a greater flow of air leaving the lungs.
This greater energy, from an acoustic point of view, results in more volume, a certain lengthening of the syllable – through the lengthening of its vowel- and also in a change in tone which is generally sharper. In this sense, stress is when we give more emphasis to some parts of an utterance, whether they be syllables or words.
This greater energy, from an acoustic point of view, results in more volume, a certain lengthening of the syllable – through the lengthening of its vowel- and also in a change in tone which is generally sharper. In this sense, stress is when we give more emphasis to some parts of an utterance, whether they be syllables or words.
The accented syllable is opposed to the others, which are pronounced with less intensity; these are called unstressed or weak syllables. We have to keep in mind that the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables is greater in English than in most languages. To capture this difference there are three levels of accentuation within certain words, usually long ones:
The primary stress, characterised by prominence; as mentioned above, stressed syllables notation, when transcribed, is a high mark ('), which stands for the most prominent syllable.
The secondary stress, weaker than the primary stress but stronger than that of the unstressed syllable; in transcriptions this is normally notated by a low mark (,)
The unstressed syllable, defined by the absence of any prominence. Unstressed syllables normally have the closed short vowels or schwa /ə/. This is the central vowel which, in terms of articulation, is neither open nor closed, neither anterior nor posterior. The schwa can appear in all positions: initial about /əˈbaʊt/, middle average /ˈæv.ər.ɪdʒ/ & reality /riˈæl.ə.ti/ and end sofa /ˈsəʊ.fə/.
We see that both syllables with primary stress and those with secondary stress have full vowels but the vowels of unstressed syllables are reduced vowels: /ə/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/.
Note, for example, the word photographic, in which the three different kinds of stress is realized. Those syllables which have not been marked stand for unstressed syllables: photographic. /ˌfəʊ.təˈɡræf.ɪk/.
The stress system in English is very complex due to the existence of a large amount of exceptions. That is why we do not intend to make any exhaustive list of the rules that regulate accentuation in English. However, we believe it is necessary to mention of a series of considerations to take into account:
Point out the syntactic relationship between words, such as the difference between noun and verb. There is a group of words, usually two syllables, of common use in which, depending on the position of the accent, they will act as nouns - if the accent falls on the first syllable - or as a verb - if the accent falls on the second syllable. For exampl
Other changes in accent position are associated with the morphological structure of the word. So we have, for example, that the word .photograph has the stress on the first syllable, but by adding the suffix -y, the accent moves to the second syllable: pho.tography. Finally the suffix -ic that marks the adjective shifts the accent even further to the right: photo. graphic. Other examples would include .industry (subs.) - in.dustrial (adj.), .politics (subs.) – political, etc
The stress in compound words, whether the first element is one noun as if it is an adjective, falls on the first element. Ex.: .darkroom, .lipstick. However, when the adjective is not part of a word compound, when it modifies the preceding noun, the accent will fall on the two elements: .black .board, .dark .room. In the sentence The teacher writes on the blackboard, "blackboard" is one compound word and therefore the first element carries the accent. Instead in the phrase I need a black board to carry out this game both, the adjective and noun, will have an accent since here we are referring to which class of plank (tauló) we need.
Word stress. Comparison with Spanish and Catalan
The accent in English can be found on any syllable of the word, which makes the learning of the English accentuation system somewhat difficult. the accentuation in English is generally found on the first syllables but in Catalan or Spanish, the tendency is to put the stress on the last ones:
--gENERAL
fUNCTIONAL
Having analysed word stress we should now turn our attention to sentence stress. Sentence stress is the music of spoken English. Like word stress, sentence stress can help you to understand spoken English, even rapid spoken English.
Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm or "beat". You remember that word stress is accent on one syllable within a word. Sentence stress is accent on certain words within a sentence.
In an ordinary statement, the words that are pronounced with more intensity are generally the ones that contain information (content words = nouns, main verbs, adjectives, demonstrative & interrogative pronouns, adverb), while the words that have less relief within the sentence are those that by themselves have less significant burden - those that are purely grammatical (function words = auxiliary verbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles). These will normally be unstressed and therefore the vowels will tend to be shortened.
It is important to distinguish between word-stress and sentence-stress. Each word in English, which consists of more than one syllable, has a fixed stress pattern. Normally one of the syllables will have stronger stress than the rest. But sentence-stress is not as fixed as that. When several words are put together in a sentence, they are seldom of equal importance, and so more are given more stress than others. Yet, this is not always so, since form words can also take a stressed form when the speaker wants to highlight or stress something.
A sentence or part of a sentence spoken with a single rush of syllables uninterrupted by a pause is a rhythm unit. The timing of rhythm units produces a rhythmic succession which is an important characteristic of the English phonological structure. The units tend to follow one another in such a way that the lapse of time between the beginning of their prominent syllables is somewhat uniform.
Since the rhythm units have different numbers of syllables, but a similar time value, the syllables of the longer ones are crushed together, and pronounced very rapidly, in order to get them pronounced at all, within that time limitation. This rhythmic crushing of syllables into short time limits is partly responsible for many abbreviations
in order to achieve these regular intervals of time, or, in other words, if a number of syllables have to fit within the rhythmic group, some syllables change both their quality and quantity, depending on whether they belong to content or form words.
English is full of loud syllables like that; they make any English utterance sound jerky compared with the even flow of many other languages, such as Spanish or Catalan. Take as an example the sentence He didn't know the reason why. As a plain statement it will be pronounced as follows: [hi 'didn't 'nəʊ ðiː 'riː.zən 'waɪ]. It has four stressed and four unstressed syllables, and they are evenly distributed so that unstressed and stressed syllables alternate. It is the stresses that give an English sentence its characteristic rhythmic pattern; this particular sentence has an iambic /aɪˈæm.bɪk/ rhythm (a rhythm characteristic of the English language in which each short syllable that is not stressed is followed by a long or stressed syllable). We have exactly the same pattern in I 'thought I 'knew him 'well e'nough and in it 'must have 'cost at 'least a 'pound. When these sentences are uttered by English speakers, the students can listen to the regular movement of the rhythm, the alternation of weak and strong beats. Stressed syllables are prominent and prominence is, as mentioned above, the sum of different factors such as loudness, length, pitch and quality.
This fact has a considerable effect on the pronunciation of English and marks a notable difference with Spanish, which is a language based on syllables and which does not support vowel reduction. Catalan supports vowel reduction as in … Not having reduced vowels makes a student speaking Spanish to give the same importance to all syllables in a sentence, which sounds wrong to the English ear.
INTONATION
The phonological system of the english language III: stress, rhythm and intonation. Comparison with the language of your community