Chapter 8: Suprasegmental Phonology: Stress, Rhythm, Intonation

8.1. Stess and prominence. The phonemic (contrastive) function of stress

8.2. Free stress and fixed stress. The predictability of accentual patterns
8.3. Metric patterns
8.4. Morphological processes and stress shift
8.5. Primary and secondary stress
8.6. Weak and strong forms. Vowel reduction and delition
8.7. Rhythm
8.8. Intonational contours. Their pragmatic value

8.7. Rhythm

In order to better explain the notion of rhythm we should go back to our previous
references to poetry and to metric units. A metric foot in poetry was, we will remember, a
sequence of syllables including a stressed one and a couple of other syllables that were
not stressed. The skillful combination of such structures results into different rhythmic
patterns. Rhythm, then, as in music, is based on combinations of louder and weaker
segments, strong beats which occur at regular intervals of time. Anyone listening to
recordings of spoken English and spoken Romanian will immediately notice an important
and striking difference between the two languages. They actually typify two different
categories of languages. In Romanian, syllables, whether stressed or not, tend to have
roughly the same duration. In English, unstressed syllables not only have their vowels
reduced as we saw above, but their duration is severely shortened. A stressed syllable has
roughly the same duration as the several unstressed syllable following it until the next
accentual peak follows. The acoustic impression that an English utterance gives is one of
a sequence having some strong, heavily marked units (the stressed syllables) around
which the much less important unstressed syllables are clustered. While in Romanian
there is a certain feeling of monotony, equally long syllables coming one after another in
humdrum succession, in English, the transition from stressed segments to a number of
unstressed segments that have together the same duration as the stressed one, giving the
feeling that they have been compressed, conveys the language a certain musical
character. Since languages like Romanian have rhythmic patterns based on the syllable,
that has an equal duration, irrespective of its stressed/unstressed character, the type of
rhythm that they display is called syllable-timed. In the other type of language – of which
English is illustrative – the time unit is not the syllable, but the stressed syllable. Such a
type of rhythm is consequently called stress-timed. It is this type of rhythm – and not
stress alone – that is also largely responsible for the reduction of vowels in English
unstressed syllable which are thus shortened to fit the narrow time slots left for them. The
correct use of these rhythmic patterns is one of the things that are most difficult to acquire
for a foreign learner of English and the improper extension to English of different
rhythmic patterns borrowed from one’s mother tongue is one of the elements that a native
English speakers will immediately recognize as indicative of a foreign accent.