Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
partly phonemically in words, and partly as a feature of
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partly phonemically in words, and partly as a feature of longer phrases or sentences. Depending on the degree of stress, and the prominence thereby given to one syllable rather than another, the following can be different words: concert, project, desert, and many others. But the phonemic feature which separates deserts (merits) from deserts (wildernesses), is not just a simple matter of emphasising the first syllable or the second. An equally important part of the stress system here involves the way the vowel in the unstressed syllable is pronounced. In the first case, the first syllable of deserts is unstressed and the vowel is weakened to the short /i/. The neutral vowel (ə) is found in the second syllable of deserts in the second case. Stress is a feature of words not only when the word contrasts phonemically with its minimal pair partner, but also in giving shape to a word as spoken. English does not have as rigid a system of stress patterning as some other languages, where, for example, the stress may fall always on the first syllable (Czech), or on the penultimate syllable (Polish), or on the last syllable (Persian). But there is still a fixed stress pattern for any particular word. Learning this is simply a matter of experience. There are only a few generalisations to be made, for example stress regularly falls on the first syllable of the suffix ‘-otion’, and the suffix ‘ity’ is always preceded by a stressed syllable. On the whole, learners simply have to get used to the sound shape of a word with its stresses. It is vital that they do so, since they may be virtually unintelligible if they use the wrong stress patterns. As a feature of phrases and sentences, stress determines the rhythm of English, which is therefore said to be stress- timed. English speakers tend to make the stressed syllables of their utterances come at roughly equal intervals of time, so that all the following sentences would take about the same time to say because they have the same number of stresses (irrespective of the number of syllables): ‘I bought a dog.’ ‘It’s a dog I bought.’ ‘But it’s a dog that I bought.’ Pronunciation 54 The unstressed syllables in longer utterances tend to be rushed and slurred so that the total time taken remains the same as long as the number of stressed syllables is the same. In many other languages, Chinese for example, each syllable is given equal time. Such a syllable-timed pronunciation of English gives a machine-gun impression, but is not difficult to understand. The problem for speakers of syllable-timed languages learning English is to understand English speech, in particular to catch the words in unstressed position which are spoken very quickly. For it is not merely a matter of speaking these words fast, but very often of changing their pronunciation as well. The most frequently observed pronunciation change is that of the weakened vowel, which usually becomes the neutral vowel in most pronouns, articles, conjunction and preposition. Words like but and a have a strong form and a weak form /b ∧t/, bət/, and /ei/, /ə/. Consonants are also affected. For example the consonant of ‘is’ changes from /z/ to /s/ when the /i/ is dropped in unstressed position after a voiceless consonant, as in ‘What’s the time?’. Stress thus functions at two levels. Within a word, one or more syllables have heavier stress than the others. At phrase and sentence level, one or more words are stressed more heavily than the others. The speaker has no choice of which syllable to stress in a word, but at phrase or sentence level he stresses words to suit his meaning. In ‘I expect you to bring John’ the speaker implies that John is to be expected rather than whoever else could be brought. But in ‘I expect you to bring John’, he implies that someone else does not expect John. Stress is thus relative. Within the word ‘expect’, the second syllable is stressed more heavily than the first. But in relation to the whole sentence, the words ‘John’ or ‘I’ are stressed more heavily than ‘expect’ and all the other words. Stress, at phrase and sentence level, is closely tied with intonation, since the pitch of the voice moves either up or down on the word which is most heavily stressed. Thus, even if a foreign speaker places his stress correctly, he cannot convey his meaning effectively unless he also uses appropriate intonation. The function of intonation in English is basically very different from its role in tone languages like Chinese or Pronunciation 55 Luganda, where it is phonemic in distinguishing words from each other just as consonants and vowels do. Thus, two words in these languages may have the same vowels and consonants, but be different words because of a fixed difference in pitch level. In English, tone (or pitch) is not phonemic in this way. On the whole English intonation conveys attitudinal or emotional meaning and is very closely tied to the context of an utterance. Thus ‘Please open the window’ can sound pleading or peremptory, depending on the intonation used. (a) (b) If the request follows the question ‘What shall I open?’, how- ever, the heaviest stress, and therefore the main pitch move- ment, must occur on ‘window’. In this case (a), the pleading intonation pattern, would change to (c) and (b) would change to (d) Since it is often naively supposed that there are universal ways of indicating attitude and emotion, the teaching of English intonation is very often neglected. It is, in fact, so important in spoken communication that many would prefer to give it priority over articulation of segmental sounds in pronunciation teaching. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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