Featuring Peggy Tharpe, ESL, EFL teacher and pronunciation nerd. Each episode in this podcast addresses a specific language and the problem it brings to English pronunciation. Includes tips for teachers and students.
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An amazing tool to improve your English pronunciation.
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t is said that meaningful words are always stressed in English. If we confront this statement with the reality, we can feel very dissapointed to find out that this is not completely true.
Listen to this interesting sentence:
Mary bought a brand new car yesterday morning.
Are you able to tell us what the stressed words are?
Listen to this sentence again for 4 times and then guess what the stressed words are.
Mary bought a brand new car yesterday morning.
“Meaningful words are always stressed in English utterances.” This is what it is usually said in some linguistic researches, but is this really true in this sentence?
To support our viewpoint, we have added a metronome to this utterance to help us identify what the stressed words are.
Listen:
Mary bought a brand new car yesterday morning.
As you can see, the only stressed words in this utterance are Mary, brand, carand morning.
The words “bought”, “new” and “yesterday”, although meaningful, are not COMPLETELY stressed. It means that their natural primary stress has been reduced to a secondary stress. So they are not taken under account when creating the rhythmic pattern.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZRd4srRsyTw/VKBOSK0XKLI/AAAAAAAAANs/i9vJXbEfgAM/s1600/MARY%2BBOUGHT%2BA%2BBRAND%2BNEW%2BCAR%2BYESTERDAY%2BMORNING%2C%2Bwith%2BSTRESS%2BMARKS.JPG
There is another feature that creates changes in the rhythm pattern of a specific utterance and that is speed. The faster we talk the less meaningful words we stress. The slower we talk, the more meaningful words we stress.
We can easily change the stress pattern of our sample sentence by reducing the speed of the utterance and, in consequence, adding more stressed words.
Listen.
Mary bought a brand new car yesterday morning.
Are you able to tell us what the stressed words are now?
Listen to this sentence again for 4 times and then guess what the stressed words are.
Mary bought a brand new car yesterday morning.
The stress pattern is now different. Every single meaningful word is stressed in this slower version of the same sentence.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ea557iAlyrk/VKGNAnHtm3I/AAAAAAAAAOw/kwvKqwVtjlI/s1600/MARY%2BBOUGHT%2C%2BALL%2BMEANINGFUL%2BWORDS.JPG
As a result, the words Mary, bought, brand, new, car, yesterday and morning are all stressed. The slowing down of the new utterance allows the inclusion of all meaningful words.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/–pCqZj2pDNs/VKCfZjoPxKI/AAAAAAAAAOY/w-1YJCMThlo/s1600/Whatever%2Bwords.JPGAs a conclusion, we can say that there is not one single way to stress a sentence or phrase, but different ways. It depends on what we want to express, emphasize or how fast we express our utterances.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ea557iAlyrk/VKGNAnHtm3I/AAAAAAAAAOw/kwvKqwVtjlI/s1600/MARY%2BBOUGHT%2C%2BALL%2BMEANINGFUL%2BWORDS.JPGWhatever words we consider important in our speech and, as a consequence we stress, it is necessary to keep a regular time interval between stressed words. This is isochronicity in English rhythm. Such a big word…!
Reality is much richer than isolated researches we can come across with.
Categories: Education
Tags: accent, american, english, modification, pronunciation, reduction