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.
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SUPRASEGMENTAL
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.
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STRESS
WORD 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.
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SENTENCE STRESS
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.
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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.
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