LECTURES 5. SYLLABIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH WORDS

Issues of the lecture:

1. The notion of syllable, classifications of syllables ;

2. Syllable formation; theories as to the syllable (expiratory, or chest pulse or pressure theory, the sonority theory, the theory of muscular tension, loudness theory);

3. Types of syllables;

4. Functions of syllables (constitutive function, distinctive function);

5. Syllable division; rules of division of English words into syllables.

Things to pay special attention:

Rules of division of English words into syllables.

The division of English words into syllables is governed by the following rules:

1) the English long monophthongs, diphthongs and the unstressed short vowels [ı, ə, υ] always occur in a phonetically open syllable (i.e. the point of syllable division is immediately after them) when they are separated from a following syllabic sound by only 1 consonant, for example: mee-ting, voi-ces, hau-sing, peo-ple, gar-den.

2) a short stressed vowel when separated from a following syllabic sound by only 1 consonant, always occurs in a closed syllable, the syllable boundary being within the consonant, for example: city, many, Spanish, body, little,

3) the sonorants [1], [m], [n] are syllabic if they are preceded by noise consonants, for example: little, blossom, sadden;

4) there cannot be more than one vowel (a diphthong or a monophthong) within one syllable;

5) the typical and most fundamental syllabic structure is of (C)VC type;

6) word final consonants are normally of weak-end type.

Russian learners of English as well as would-be teachers of English should be well aware of the regularities governing the structure of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words as well as the syllabic structure of the utterance. What matters here is that wrong syllable division on the articulatory level leads to inadequate perception of phrases and consequently to misunderstanding.

Syllabic consonant

The great majority of syllables in all languages have a vowel at their centre, and may have one or more consonantspreceding and following the vowel (though languages differ greatly in the possible occurrences of consonants in syllables). However, in a few cases we find syllables which contain nothing that could conventionally be classed as a vowel. Sometimes this is a normal state of affairs in a particular language (consider the first syllables of the Czech names 'Brno' and 'Vltava'); in some other languages syllabic consonants appear to arise as a consequence of a weak vowel becoming lost. In German, for example, the word 'abend' may be pronounced in more rapid speech as [ɑbnt] or [ɑbmt]. In English some syllabic consonants appear to have become obligatory in present-day speech: words such as 'bottle' and 'button' would not sound acceptable in BBC pronunciation if pronounced [bɒtəl], [bɒtən] (though these are normal in some other English accents), and must be pronounced [bɒtl], [bɒtn]. In many other cases in English it appears to be possible either to pronounce [m n ŋ l r] as syllabic consonants or to pronounce them with a preceding vowel, as in 'open' [əʊpm] or [əʊpən], 'orderly' [ɔ:dli] or [ɔ:dəli], 'history' [hɪstri] or [hɪstəri]. The matter is more confusing because of the fact that speakers do not agree in their intuitions about whether a consonant (particularly [l]) is syllabic or not: while most would agree that, for example, 'cuddle' and 'cycle' are disyllabic (i.e. contain two syllables), 'cuddly' and 'cycling' are disyllabic for some people (and therefore do not contain a syllabic consonant) while for others they are trisyllabic. More research is needed in this area for English. In Japanese we find that some consonants appear to be able to stand as syllables by themselves, according to the intuitions of native speakers who are asked to divide speech up into rhythmical beats.

Syllable

The syllable is a fundamentally important unit both in phonetics and in phonology. It is a good idea to keep phonetic notions of the syllable separate from phonological ones. Phonetically we can observe that the flow of speech typically consists of an alternation between vowel-like states (where the vocal tract is comparatively open and unobstructed) and consonant-like states where some obstruction to the airflow is made. Silence and pause are to be regarded as being of consonantal type in this case. So from the speech production point of view a syllable consists of a movement from a constricted or silent state to a vowel-like state and then back to constricted or silent. From the acoustic point of view, this means that the speech signal shows a series of peaks of energy (roughly in the frequency range 500 - 3000 Hz.) corresponding to vowel-like states separated by troughs of lower energy. However, this view of the syllable appears often not to fit the facts when we look at the phonemic structure of syllables and at speakers' views about them. One of the most difficult areas is that of syllabic consonants (see above). Phonologists are interested in the structure of the syllable, since there appear to be interesting observations to be made about which phonemes may occur at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of syllables. The study of sequences of phonemes is called phonotactics, and it seems that the phonotactic possibilities of a language are determined by syllabic structure; this means that any sequence of sounds that a native speaker produces can be broken down into syllables without any segments being left over. For example, in 'Their strengths triumphed frequently', we find the rather daunting sequences of consonant phonemes [ŋθstr] and [mftfr], but using what we know of English phonotactics we can split these clusters into one part that belongs to the end of one syllable and another part that belongs to the beginning of another. Thus the first one can only be divided [ŋθ |str] or [ŋθs |tr] and the second can only be [mft |fr]. Phonological treatments of syllable structure usually call the first part of a syllable the onset, the middle part the peak and the end part the coda; the combination of peak and coda is called the rhyme. These are explained more fully under separate headings. Syllables are claimed to be the most basic unit in speech: every language has syllables, and babies learn to produce syllables before they can manage to say a word of their native language. When a person has a speech disorder, their speech will still display syllabic organization, and slips of the tongue also show that syllabic regularity tends to be preserved even in "faulty" speech.

Syllable-timing

Languages in which all syllables tend to have an equal time value in the rhythm of the language are said to be syllable-timed; this tendency is contrasted with stress-timing, where the time between stressed syllables is said to tend be equal irrespective of the number of unstressed syllables in between. Spanish and French are often claimed to be syllable-timed; many phoneticians, however, doubt whether any language is truly syllable-timed.

Coda

This term refers to the end of a syllable. The central part of a syllable is almost always a vowel, and if the syllable contains nothing after the vowel it is said to have no coda ("zero coda"). Some languages have no codas in any syllables. English allows up to four consonants to occur in the coda, so the total number of possible codas in English is very large - several hundred, in fact.

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Literature:

1) Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П., Кантер Л.А., Крылова Н.И. Практическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб.для студ.высш.уч.заведений. –М.:Гуманит.изд.центр ВЛАДОС, 2003.- с.133-137.

2) Васильев В.А. Фонетика английского языка. Теоретический курс. - М: «Высшая школа», 1969.- С. 229-250.

3) Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П., Кантер Л.А., Крылова Н.И. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб.для студ.высш.уч.заведений. –М.:Гуманит.изд.центр ВЛАДОС, 2004.- с.112-121.

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LECTURES 6. WORD-STRESS

Issues of the lecture:

1) The notion of word accent or word stress;

2) Ways to increase the degree of prominence;

3) Functions of word stress: constitutive function, identificatory (or recognitive), distinctive function;

4) Word stress theories;

5) The degrees and position of word stress;

6) Principles of dynamic stress, musical stress, qualitative stress and quantitative stress.

7) Free stress, fixed stress and with no word-stress languages.

8) Constant and shifting accent

9) Level stress

10) Basic rules of English word accentuation.

Things to pay special attention:

The American descriptivists distinguish a greater number of degrees of word-stress; they use other terms to denote them and other marks to indicate each degree. But as in the case of the phonemic analysis of General American sounds their treatment of the degrees of word-stress is not uniform: different linguists designate by different terms the same degrees of stress and sometimes even allocate different degrees of stress to one and the same syllable in one and the same word pronounced in isolation.

Thus, B. Bloch and G. Trager write that "English stress can be completely described in terms of four contrasting grades. These may be numbered from 1 (loudest) to 4 (weakest) or called by descriptive names such as loud, reduced loud, medial and weak:it is useful to group the first three together as strong. In a phonemic transcription, the strong stresses are best indicated by accent marks over the vowel letters, as /à, á, â/, the weak stress by the absence of a mark, as /a/.

H. A. Gleason and most other American descriptivists distinguish also four degrees of word-stress in English, calling and indicating them as follows: (1) primary stress — /'/, (2) secondary stress — / /, (3) tertiary stress — /`/, and (4) weak stress— /^v/. The last stress is, however, left unmarked in a transcription of words or longer portions unless it is desired to call special attention to it. In an example where stresses are shown, any vowel with no stress marked will be understood to have weak stress.

The distinction between secondary and tertiary stresses is a very subtle one, and there are, so far, no generally recognized formal indicators of their occurrence in relation to the primary stress or pitch levels.

The American descriptivists differ not only from each other but also from Britishphoneticians in their judgment of secondary and terrtiary stresses. Thus, the stress on the second pretonic syllable in such a word as discrimination or animation is tertiary according to B. Bloch & G. Trager or H. A. Gleason, whereas it can only be secondary according to the British phoneticians.

The like contradictions and discrepancies are due to two factors.

1) The first is that the American descriptivists interpretation of the nature of English word accent is oversimplified. They reduce it to different degrees of loudness, the perception of which is highly subjective, and underestimate the role of the other components of word accent, viz. changes of pitch level and pitch direction, of quality and quantity.

2) The second factor is that the American descriptivists and, to a lesser extent, British phoneticians do not discriminate between word accent, phrase accent and sentence accent. The word accent is a constituent feature of the phonetic structure of the word as a vocabulary item, which exists as such when it is pronounced in isolation, or, at the most, as part of compound words or free word combinations also pronounced in isolation.

Sentence accent is one of the components of the spoken sentence, intonation in the broad sense of the word.

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Literature:

2) Васильев В.А. Фонетика английского языка. Теоретический курс. - М: «Высшая школа», 1969.- С. 257-286.

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