© 2023 Prezi Inc.
Terms & Privacy Policy
Recently I had an exchange with Michael Frost (participant on the Oxford Diploma course) triggered by his question “At what level do you think it becomes possible for learners to consciously improve their awareness and use of sentence stress? For example, when teaching meetings language, I sometimes try to teach my adult Chinese BE learners to say, ‘What do YOU think?’ rather than ‘What do you THINK?’ when bringing someone into the discussion. I find that if they are Pre-Intermediate or higher they can self-correct or produce the taught stress pattern after I have pointed it out a few times, but if they are Elementary level it seems that they still need to focus on what words they need to produce and so are unable to incorporate any aspect of stress control. Do you have any advice for teaching sentence stress to lower level learners? Thanks!
My response to Michael was as follows: “…The way I see sentence stress is that it revolves around prominence, that is the meaning that the speaker wants to attribute to the chosen words by the distribution of energy (especially but not only through volume and length of syllables). Thus prominence (or sentence stress) is chosen by the speaker according to their intended meaning, and is central to intonation since a significant portion of the tone movement is carried out or initiated on the prominent syllable.
Word stress on the other hand is dictated by the language rather than chosen by the speaker, which is why it can be confidently (though not infallibly) predicted in dictionaries.
For learners to have a real chance of manipulating prominence or sentence stress (chosen by the speaker) they need to begin with word stress (chosen by the language). And one of the keys to the English word stress system in practice is that it is not so much about stress as about unstress, the absence of length, pitch and volume markers, especially through vowel reduction (such as the use of schwa … whose German/Hebrew root means “neutral… empty”).
So I try to help my learners to use stress by helping them to hear, articulate and understand unstress in all its forms. In working with word stress you lay the foundations for energising syllables and de-energising other syllables to build the energy distribution, or profile, of each word. And this practice needs to begin right at the beginning with every item of vocabulary encountered, especially words of two or more syllables. The stress pattern is part of the acoustic, muscular and physical identity of a word, and is needed at the point of contact with a new word, not as a later repair or upgrade.
It is entirely likely that Elementary students will be more preoccupied with the form of the language, including the form of the chosen words and the articulation of the required and fixed word stress. And only as they become able to operate word stress and unstress at will does it become possible for them to use prominence, or sentence stress, to convey their own chosen and felt meanings. It is important to see that in helping our students to learn to manipulate wordstress we are also helping our students to master the physical aspects producing prominence, or sentence stress.
Maybe I didn’t really answer Michael’s question. But he makes the interesting observation that learners while preoccupied with getting the right words in the right order are less able to attend to the delivery of their meaning exactly as they want it, using the system of the new language. And my point is .go with that, because the attention to the physical manipulation of word stress now will facilitate production of sentence stress later. I’m sure others will have views on this from their experience.
My next post will probably return to the series: The Story of Sounds, with Episode 11 ….
The phonetic structure of a word comprises not only the sounds that
the word is composed of and not only the syllabic structure that
these sounds form, it also has a definite stress pattern. And if a
word contains more than one syllable, the relative prominence of
those syllables differs. There may be one prominent syllable in a
word as compared to the rest of the syllables of the same word, there
may be two equally prominent syllables, two unequally prominent
syllables or more prominent syllables.And this correlation of degrees
of prominence of the syllables in a word forms the stress pattern of
the word, which is often called the accentual structure of a word.
Monosyllabic words have no stress pattern, because there can be
established no correlation of prominence within it. Yet as lexical
units monosyllables are regarded as stressed. Actual speech does not
consist of isolated words. And the stress pattern of a word is
deduced from how the word is accented in connected speech. The
placement of utterance stress is primarily conditioned by the
situational and linguistic context. In different languages stress may
be achieved by various combinations of these parameters. Depending
upon which parameter is the principal one in producing the effect of
stress, word stress in languages may be of different types. English
word stress was considered to be dynamic, as stress was generally
correlated with loudness. pitch movement in English is also one of
the most important cues for prominence. But it is not the pitch
direction that is significant in English, it is the pitch contrast
that really matters. English does not depend on intensity alone, and
that English word stress is of a complex nature.
12. Linguistically relevant types of word stress: primary, secondary, weak. Functions of word stress.
There are 2 views of the matter. Some (Jones,
Kingdon, Vassilyev) consider that there are 3 degrees of word stress
in English: primary (strong stress), secondary (partial stress), weak
( unstressed syllables have weak stress).All these degrees of stress
are linguistically relevant as there are words in English the meaning
of which depend upon the occurrence of either of 3 degrees in their
stress patterns.But auditory analysis shows that there are certain
positions in the stress patterns of English words where the vowel
generally remains unobscured and its duration is considerable, though
the syllable it occurs in does not actually bear primary or secondary
stress. On this account some American linguists distinguish 4
degrees:—primary
stress (cupboard),-secondary stress (discrimination),-tertiary stress
(analyse),-weak stress (cupboard)American
phoneticians consider that the secondary stress generally occurs
before the primary stress (examination), while tertiary stress occurs
after the primary stress(handbook).
Linguistically, tertiary word stress as there are
no words in English the meanings of which depend on whether their
stress pattern is characterized by either secondary or tertiary
stress.That is why the stress pattern of English words may be defined
as a correlation of 3 degrees of stress.Word stress has a
constitutive function
as it moulds syllables into a word forming its stress pattern.
Without a definite stress pattern a word ceases to be a word and
becomes a sequence of syllables.Distinctive
function exists in English because
there are different words in English with analogous sound structure
which are differentiated in speech only by their stress patterns.Word
stress has an identificatory function
as well, because the stress patterns of enable people to identify
definite combinations of sounds as meaningful linguistic units.Thus,
it is obvious that word stress performs its linguistic functions only
as a structural element of a word. It is actually the stress pattern
of a word that performs both the distinctive and the identificatory
functions. And it is in the stress pattern of a word that the degrees
of stress can be differentiated and opposed one another.
13. Accentuation
tendencies in English. Basic stress patterns (accentual structures)
of English words.
There are languages in which stress always falls on the first
syllable {as in Czech and Finnish), or on the last syllable {as in
French and Turkish). Word stress in such languages is said to be
fixed. The stress patterns of the bulk of English words are regular
and stable. G.Torsuyev, who has made a special analysis of the
English stress patterns, distinguishes more than 100 stress patterns,
which he groups into 11 main types. Though word stress in English is
called free, there are certain tendencies in English which to a
certain extent regulate the accentuation of words. The linguists who
have made a thorough analysis of English stress patterns have agreed
upon the existence of two main accentuation tendencies in English :
the recessive tendency and the rhythmic tendency. According to the
recessive tendency, stress falls on the first syllable which is
generally the root syllable (e.g. «mother», «father»,
«sister», «brother») or on the second syllable in
words which have a prefix of no special meaning (e.g., «become»,
indeed). The recessive tendency in stressing words is characteristic
of words of Anglo—Saxon origin, but the tendency has also
influenced many borrowings. In words with more than four syllables we
very often find the influence of both the rhythmic and the recessive
tendencies. This regularity is sometimes called the retentive
tendency in English.
14. Modifications of phonemes in connected
speech.Stylistic differentiation of vowels and consonants in English.
Every phoneme displays a vast range of variation in connected
speech.Among the different types of variation we distinguish
idiolectical,diaphonic and allophonic variation. IDIOLECTICAL
variation embraces the individual peculiarities of articulating
sounds,which are caused by the shape and form of the speakers’
speech organs and by his articulatory habits.DIAPHONIC variation
affects the quality and quantity of particular phonemes.It is caused
by concrete historical tendencies active in certain localities.The
less noticeable variation of phonemes is a ALLOPHONIC variation,which
is conditioned by phonetic position and phonetic environment. It has
already been mentioned that in connected speech the sounds undergo
various modifications under the influence of neighboring sounds and
the intonation patterns they occur in.English vowels are considerably
modified in unstressed syllables.The weakening of articulation and
shortening of the duration of unstressed vowels results in
modification of their quality and quantity.This phonetic phenomenon
is known as REDUCTION.English vowels are also modified by the
neighboring consonants,mainly by the following consonant.There is
always an overlapping of articulatory movements of neighboring
sounds.The process of adapting the articulation of a vowel to a
consonant, or a consonant to a vowel,is known as ACCOMODATION.
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #
- #