The influence of Rhythm on the Distribution of Syllables

Every language has its own characteristic rhythm and one of the most difficult areas masters of the spoken form of a foreign language is that of rhythm. The rhythm is an art of the general look of how the speakers of their language speak it. It is intimately bound in with the whole muscular setting which characterizes the speakers of different languages- the way the head is held and moved during speech the way the lower jaw and tongue are held in relation to the upper jaw the great variety of bodily movement of different kinds which help us to identify speakers of different languages even without hearing them speak. It takes a great deal of confidence to be able to put aside the identifying muscular characteristics of one’s own language and adopt those of another, and very few teaching programs will find time to try to teach students to master anything so difficult. The rhythm in English is not just something extra, added to the basic sequence of consonants and vowels; it is the guide to the structure of information in the spoken message.

The rhythm of English is based on the contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables. If we watch an English speaker talking we will be able to see, without hearing what he is saying where the stressed syllables are. And the big muscular movements that he makes are in time with the stressed syllables. When he waves his arms, nods his head, raises his eyebrows, frowns, opens his haw mere widely, all this is done in time with the rhythm of speech. This is of course hardly surprising. All human physical activity which is extended in time tends to be rhythmical activity- breathing, walking, sewing, knitting, and swimming. There is a tendency for a rhythm to be established in speech. The rhythmic beat in English is the stressed syllable. These beats will coincide with other muscular beats of body. This unity of bodily rhythm and speech rhythm is particularly clearly seen in the case of the stutter who, when he gets stuck on an articulation, may enlarge some other muscular rhythm-nod his head or tap with his foot-in trying to reestablish the speech rhythm.

The stressed syllables and their accompanying muscular movements elsewhere in the body will tend to occur at roughly equal intervals of time but just as in other human activities: swimming for instance, some beats will be slightly early, some slightly late and some may be missing altogether. The more organized the speech the more rhythmical it will be. Thus, in general, prose read aloud by a fluent reader has a much more obvious rhythm than conversational speech which may be full of pauses and starts. Very fluent speakers, who can organize their thoughts well in advance of actually uttering them, also establish a far more obvious rhythm than those who have to search for the right word and keep trying to refine a thought while in the middle of expressing it. So we can say that there is a tendency to establish a rhythm. The rhythmic beat will consist of stressed syllables. Any unstressed syllables occurring between the stressed syllables will be compressed as far as possible in order to allow the next stressed syllables to come on the regular beat. In the following example each stressed syllables is underlined:

The electricity board stated that they would be obliged to consider the reintroduction of power cuts.

This example was read in the manner shown here by a radio news reader. Now it is quite clear that the stressed syllables are not divided by an equal number of unstressed syllables. We can show this by representing the stressed syllables by capital A-s and the unstressed syllables by small a-s.

aaaAaaAAaaaaaaAaaAaaAaaAaaAaAaA

In verse, and in press read aloud we have to take into account not only the spoken stressed syllables which mark the rhythmic beat but also the pauses at commas and full stops which are an integral part of the total rhythmic effect just as a rest is in music.

The face of the speaker will always give a visual clue to the stressed syllables. Even an impressive speaker who has very few obvious extraneous movements while he is speaking will make larger gestures with his jaw, and lips in producing the initial consonants and the vowels of stressed syllables than in producing unstressed syllables.

Stressed syllables are sometimes said to be pronounced with more “force” than unstressed syllables. “Force” must be interpreted in a very general way. Some syllables which are perceived as stressed are louder than the surrounding unstressed syllables but sometimes there is no measurable difference of loudness. Some stressed syllables are spoken on a higher pitch than surrounding unstressed syllables, but a sudden dramatic drop in pitch may have the effect of marking a stressed syllable. Any syllable on which the pitch of the voice moves perceptibly-whether the pitch rises or falls-will be perceived stressed. Any syllable which is markedly longer than the surrounding syllables will also be perceived as stressed. From the point of view of teaching production of stress, length is the variable that most students find easiest to control, and is a reliable marker of stress. Speakers of languages where each syllable is roughly equal in length would do well to practice producing English stressed syllables with a count of two on each stress as against one on unstressed syllables.

Concerning the terms of tendencies, the following tendencies will be observed:

(a)   Stops which are initial in stressed syllables will be pronounced with a moment of firm closure which completely obstructs the air stream. “Voiceless” stops will be followed by aspiration. Stops initial in an unstressed syllable will be weakly articulated- it may be that the closure will not be completely closed, resulting either in a very weak stop or a slightly fricative-sounding stop. Thus for the second stop in each of the words: Paper, baby, the lips may not form a completed.

(b)   Fricatives initial in a stressed syllable will have more friction and last longer than those initial in an unstressed syllable. For example the initial /s/ in ceasing will be more fricative and longer than the second.

(c)    Vowels in stressed syllables will have the qualities associated with them. For instance “round” vowels will have lip rounding and diphthongs will be diphthongized. The “same” vowels in unstressed syllables will be more obscure in quality, “round” vowels in unstressed syllables will not have lip rounding and diphthongs will not be diphthongized. For instance, when /і / in here is in stressed position, as in come here, the quality of the diphthong is clearly heard, but in unstressed position as in he comes her constantly, the /I / is pronounced as a sort of very obscure /e/.

It should be clear from this description that it is not sufficient simply to describe unstressed syllables in terms of the vowel / / and the “reduced” vowel [ i ] as is sometimes done. Not all unstressed vowels are reduced to these vowels, as we have just seen in our example, and the reduction in explicitness of pronunciation of the consonants is just as marked as the reduction of the vowel quality.

In general, stressed syllables will be marked by standing out in pitch against the surrounding unstressed syllables- either by the pith moving, or being higher or lower than the surrounding unstressed syllables, by being pronounced more distinctly.

Every word pronounced in isolation must bear a stress. Thus for example pronouns like he and who must be stressed when they are pronounced in isolation but when they are pronounced in sentences they are rarely stressed. In the sentences he called on the prime minister and the man who was found in the Shankill Road area was already dead, he and who will be unstressed except in the rare case when they are contradicting some previous remark as in He-not she-called on the prime minister. In all cases where “contrastive stress is not involved, nearly all grammatical words will lose their stress when they are combined together to form an utterance, whereas nearly all lexical word will keep their stress. Grammatical words are the words that show the relations between the parts of an utterance - conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and so on. Lexical words are the words that carry the meaning of the utterance – nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

The Function of stress then is to mark the meaning words, the information – bearing words in the utterance. Let’s consider the following sentences:

1.      The discharged prisoners’ aid society will be organizing a number of demonstrations.

2.      The meeting of the two prime ministers has had to be postponed.

3.      Areas in the west of Scotland escaped their expected electricity cut this morning.

There is no one way of reading these sentences – by stressing different words the “same” sentences are interpreted rather differently. There is however a number of words in each sentence which will have to be stressed no matter how the sentence is interpreted. In 1 discharged prisoners, aid, society, organizing, and demonstrations; in 2 meeting, prime ministers, postponed, 3 areas, west, Scotland will have to be stressed in any reading. In each case what is being talked about the subject of the sentences, and what is being said about the subject, must be stressed.

It is widely agreed that unstress is very difficult thing to teach. The difficulties arise for various reasons. In some languages each syllables and the notion on of linguistic stress is completely alien-it just does not apply in such languages. The difficulty is that a quite new linguistic concept has to be taught from scratch. For teachers who are accustomed always to ask a students for more of X and Y it is hard to have to start asking a student to produce loss, especially when it is harder to hear whether the obscure form is correct than it was to hear the explicit form was incorrect. It must be the heat-breaking experience of many teachers that in trying to persuade a student to produce an acceptable form for mother. They work hard on the dental / / and the vowel / /. The student produces a careful and slow /    /. It may be that a more satisfactory approach to the teaching of the production of correct stress patterns. Already many teachers use taped or record courses of stress exercises spoken by native speakers.