Phonology 2

The Distance Delta

International House London and the British Council

 The Distance Delta

Phonology 2

Summary
This input is about connected speech. Before looking at the features of connected speech,
however, we will need to look at the issue of stress, both word stress and sentence stress.
We will also be looking at some features that result from the fact that English is largely a
stress-timed language, although this concept has been criticised recently, as we will see.
We will be looking at a selection of exercises and activities dealing with features of
connected speech.

Objectives
By the end of this input you will:

Know about the features and problems of word stress and sentence stress in English.

Be able to understand the concept of syllable-timed and stress-timed languages, and be

aware of different current views of this concept.

Be able to identify and explain particular features of connected speech.

Be prepared to teach students how to recognise features of connected speech and how
to produce these features as accurately as possible.

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Contents

1. Introduction to Stress and Word Stress

2. Teaching Word Stress

3. Introduction to Sentence Stress

4. Teaching Sentence Stress

4.1. Recognition

4.2. Production

5. English as a Stress-Timed language?

6. Features of Connected Speech

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Assimilation

6.3. Liaison/Catenation

6.4. Elision

6.5. Weak Forms

7. Teaching Connected Speech

7.1. Some issues concerning the Teaching of Connected Speech

8. Terminology Review

Reading

Appendices

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1. Introduction to Stress and Word Stress

Stress is a term we use to describe the prominent syllable of a word or a sentence. We can
talk about both word stress and sentence stress (or prominence).

Each word of more than one syllable has a more strongly stressed syllable. The position of
stress is an important feature of an utterance; even in a single word it can be a defining
feature; indeed a word mis-stressed is not only wrong, it could be unrecognisable to the
listener. Try saying daffodil with the stress on the second syllable instead of the first.
Worse, it could be heard as something else.

Important is stressed on the second syllable. Move it to the first syllable and see what
happens.

Important, mis-stressed by placing stress on the first syllable, becomes more like
impotent.

Graffiti stressed on the first syllable becomes more like gravity.

What is stress exactly? It is when a syllable is made louder and longer; as a result there is a
greater expulsion of air. The other syllables become, or appear to be, weak by contrast.
There can also be a change in pitch; in fact the stressed syllable will be where meaningful
pitch movement takes place. There is more about pitch in Phonology 3.

The question arises: how can learners know where the stress falls when they first encounter
a word on the page? Is there any way we can help them, at least to have some expectations
as to the patterns of stress? Certainly there are rules, or at least patterns: see the following
task.

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Task 1: Evaluating Word Stress Rules (20mins)

Look at the following rules concerning word stress. Of course these are not absolute
rules, and you may be able to think of exceptions. How many of these rules do you think
students would find useful and therefore you would teach?

There is front weight in many two-syllable nouns and adjectives: water / ugly

In words with suffixes the suffixes are never stressed: -ly in quietly etc.

There is a set of words which can be used as a verb or a noun in English

increase/decrease' export/import record insult permit etc.

In all these words, the noun has the stress on the first syllable, and the verb has the
stress on the last syllable.

The following suffixes (-ary, -ator etc.) cause the stress to be placed on the fourth
syllable from the end of the word e.g. vocabulary, gladiator, alimony etc.

The following suffixes (-ity, -logy, -graphy, -cracy, -sophy etc.) cause the stress
to be placed on the third syllable from the end of the word e.g. democracy,
university, philosophy etc.

The following suffixes (-ic, -ation etc.) cause the stress to be placed on the second
syllable from the end of the word e.g. automatic, administration etc.

A general tendency is for the stressed syllable to be somewhere in the middle of the
word rather than on the first or last syllable in words of four, five or six syllables e.g.
conservative, originality, environmentally etc.

Compound words: Words formed from a combination of two words tend to be

stressed on the first element. Examples are: postman, newspaper, teapot and
crossword.

The suffix -able usually does not change the stress pattern of a word to which it is
added e.g. commend and commendable, comfort and comfortable etc.

Most of these rules or tendencies are from Kelly, G., 2000, How to Teach Pronunciation,
Pearson Longman or Kenworthy, J. 1996 Teaching English Pronunciation Longman.

Word stress rules are very often:

Complicated

Complicated to express

Fraught with exceptions

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These may be useful rules for the purposes of descriptive linguistics but are rather complex
from the pedagogical point of view. Even the simplest rules tend to be cautious: and of
course the writers cited above recognise this. Of one particular stress observation Kelly
writes: This is a valid observation. But how dependable a rule can this be to a student? In
saying so he recognises that a useful rule of linguistics may have dubious pedagogic value. So
it could be that an ad hoc approach to stress may be a more effective way of dealing with
this problem.

2. Teaching Word Stress

You will recall that when we dealt with sounds we described the stages of:

Differentiation / Recognition

Production

The same stages can apply to the work we have to do on word stress, and later on sentence
stress and features of connected speech. Once again it could be said that by and large
students need to recognise before they can produce.

Here we will look at some of the exercises that we can give our students to help them with
the recognition and production of word stress. First, recognition:

Task 2: Differentiation / Recognition of Word Stress - Activities (20mins)

Example: Same or different?

The learners are presented with words or short phrases in pairs, and asked to say
whether they are the same or different in stress pattern e.g. operate and beautiful,
Coca-cola and lemonade.

This is a useful exercise for recognition purposes, providing the lexical items are known
to the learners, so that they see them as relevant to their language learning as a whole.
It could be used as a warmer or as part of a focus on revision of lexis covered during the
previous week / term / course.

1. Now consider the next two exercises from published pronunciation materials. What
is the exercise focusing on?

2. How useful is the exercise?

3. At what level would you introduce these materials?

4. In what way might you adapt them, incorporate them into a lesson?

(From Kenworthy, J. 1987, Teaching English Pronunciation, Longman)

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In the following exercise, for higher level students, the main task is the identification of the
main stress. Connected to this is also focus on those weak syllables that have the schwa
sound //.

From Bowler, B. & Cunningham, S. 1991 Headway Upper Intermediate Pronunciation OUP

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In the following exercise the focus is on word stress patterns:

Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 1 Heinemann (p13)

Task 3: Production of Word Stress - Activities (20mins)

Here are two activities from different books for the productive practice of word stress. As
before consider for each:

1. What is the exercise focusing on?

2. How useful is the exercise?

3. At what level would you introduce these materials?

4. In what way might you adapt them, incorporate them into a lesson?

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From Cunningham, C. & Moor, P. 1996 Headway Elementary Pronunciation OUP

(p31)

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From Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 2 Heinemann (p23)

3. Introduction to Sentence Stress

Stresses in sentences (also known as prominence) may be the result of several things. Some
words are more likely to be stressed than others because they are content words rather
than structural words. Consider the following example:

Lukes taller than Samantha.

Clearly the two names and the comparative adjective are more prominent than the modest
structural word than, which would almost disappear in rapid speech. Secondly, some
content words have more prominence than others. This is for a reason and learners or even
recently trained teachers sometimes ask this question: Where is the stress in this sentence:
Hes been working in London for five years?

Of course the assumption here is wrong; a sentence has no one correct stressed syllable. It
would most probably be on the word years if only because the natural fall of a neutral (or
unmarked) statement would take place there. However, contexts could be imagined that
would allow us to stress this sentence in different places:

1. Hes been working in London for five years.

2. Hes been working in London for five years.

3. Hes been working in London for five years.

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4. Hes been working in London for five years.

5. Hes been working in London for five years.

The meaning in each instance is as a result quite changed, for sentence stress is of course
meaningful. Sentence stress differentiates between one explicit option and lots of other
implicit ones; there are always invisible alternatives, or marked utterances: For example:

Hes been working in London. (means not in Innsbruck, not Grimsby etc.)

For the sentences 1-4 above you try to find a conversational context for each of the possible
utterances, and think of the implicit alternatives.

Another reason for words to be stressed rather than other words is that some words are
new information, other words information that is already known. Think of this conversation
at a party:

Host: (to guest) I thought John was coming? (Here John is the new information).

Guest: Oh Johns coming OK. Hes getting a lift with Mary. (Here John is now old
information. Mary is new information so is prominent).

The term sentence stress can be a little misleading as dialogues between friends can often
be formed of grammatically incomplete utterances e.g.

A: Tea?

B: Sounds good.

A: How do you take it?

B: Milk. No sugar.

So in Sounds good, the stress arguably falls on good yet it is not a sentence but an
utterance where good receives prominence i.e. there is a movement in pitch which serves
to stress a syllable. Where the greatest movement happens is called nuclear stress or the
tonic syllable.

4. Teaching Sentence Stress

As we have seen, in a typical sentence most syllables of the sentence are not stressed.
Indeed often all of them except one remain unstressed. One of the problems in drawing the
students attention to sentence stress is to risk them becoming over-attentive to details that
would perhaps be best disregarded in the interests of focus on the single stressed syllable.
Even left to their own devices, students will focus on individual syllables, possibly giving
them prominence that is not required. As Kenworthy says in Teaching English
Pronunciation:

Every word seems important to someone who is struggling to put together a

message in a new language.

What can we do to help students with sentence stress? Once again, work has to be done for
both differentiation/recognition and production:

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4.1. Differentiation / Recognition

Here are two extracts from materials that deal with the recognition of sentence stress:

From Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 1 Heinemann (p23)

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From Cunningham, S. and Bowler, B. 1990 Headway Intermediate Pronunciation Oxford University
Press (p32)

4.2. Production

There are activities we can use to help the learner. The first thing of course is to deal with
the phenomenon mentioned above whereby a differently stressed word changes the
emphasis of a sentence and its meaning. Kenworthy (1987) describes the following activity:

At beginners level it is possible to demonstrate the shift of stress using simple

dialogues in which the two speakers ask each other the same question in turn.
Heres an example (stressed syllables are in bold):

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A: What do you do?

B: Im a computer programmer. What do you do?

A: I work in a solicitors office.

Here are two further examples from books devoted to Pronunciation. Notice that while in
both the materials the activities are productive in the first from English Aloud 1 the
production is simply imitative, though it remains a valid exercise. In the second from
Headway Upper Intermediate Pronunciation, students have to think consciously where the
appropriate stress should go and this provides a useful stage between recognition and real
production.

Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 1 Heinemann (p30)

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From Bowler, B. & Cunningham, S. 1991 Headway Upper intermediate Pronunciation OUP
(p3)

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Task 4: Questionnaire on Word and Sentence Stress (40mins) (Optional)

Ask one or two your colleagues how they teach word and sentence stress. Find out as
much as you can of their tricks of the trade. Your questions are going to concern how
they focus on:

Both word stress and sentence stress: ask them what they do.

In class generally to indicate stress position on the board.

In the presentation of new language items, lexical, structural, functional etc.

Post your most interesting findings or 3 favourite ideas on the Discussion Forum on the
Delta website.

5. English as a Stress-Timed Language?

Well-defined stressed syllables are a major feature of English. As a result English has
sometimes been described as a stress-timed language. Longman Dictionary of Language
Teaching and Applied Linguistics gives this definition:

A stress timed language (such as English) is a speech rhythm in which the

stressed syllables recur at equal intervals of time.

Consider the following utterance:

Has anyone got todays paper?

It is comprised of two tone groups which are bounded by (brief) pauses when we speak. In
each tone group there is a stressed word, or syllable within a word if the word is more than
one syllable long, which in the above utterance has been underlined. While the stressed
syllables occur regularly, the spaces in between can be comprised of varying numbers of
syllables, often crammed together and phonologically distorted. So the first tone group has
five syllables, and the second only four, although the time taken to utter each tone group is
(roughly) the same.

Syllable-timed languages

A syllable timed rhythm is a speech rhythm in which all syllables are said to
recur at equal intervals.

French, for example, could be seen as such a language: If you say the following sentence you
will notice a more or less even regular fall of syllables:

Il est arriv a six heures (example from Longman Dictionary).

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Japanese and Spanish are other examples of syllable timed languages.

The Longman Dictionary is rightly cautious about these two types of timing. They are
tendencies rather than absolute categories. Recent research, employing very sophisticated
measuring techniques, has proved that such compression is only a tendency and not a hard-
and-fast rule, implying that languages fall somewhere on a continuum between stress-timed
and syllable-timed, and may vary depending on the kind of speech act. For example, an
informal chat in English is more likely to have more elements of stress-timing than a pre-
written speech.

Nonetheless, it is certainly true that in English a dramatically different number of syllables

can be found between one stressed syllable and the next, and furthermore that this obliges
English words to be distinctly elastic.

6. Features of Connected Speech

6.1 Introduction

We might imagine that it is possible to specify a correct pronunciation for each word. Even
a dictionary is likely to tell you that she is pronounced /i/ In fact, within a crowded and
rapidly spoken sentence in which this word has to jostle for space, she may end up
something more like // as in she goes or // or just //as in she lives.

In complete utterances all sorts of distortions take place; this is true of all languages, of
course; but is a phenomenon particularly evident in English, which is phonologically an
extremely malleable language; weak syllables get squashed together; strong ones can be
remarkably attenuated.

Take the question How long have you worked here? Say this at natural i.e. fast speed and
you will see that the four syllables of how longve you probably take slightly less time than
the syllable worked.

In everyday conversation this would sound, or rather look something like this: hlongvyou
w o r k e d here.

The fact of stress timing means that within words some syllables become weakened and
distorted, indeed have to be in order to fit into the stress timing. But things happen not just
within words; we also have to see what happens at their junctures, where one word borders
with another. We will now look at some of the features of connected speech.

6.2 Assimilation

This is when a speech sound changes, becoming more like another sound which follows or
precedes it.

This phenomenon is already visible in the spelling of words. For example it is not by chance
that we say impossible and intolerant. Try to switch the negative prefixes around and you
will find they take more effort to say. What we are looking at then is the phonological law of
least effort. Spoken language certainly obeys the assimilation law of least effort. Look at the
word handbag. Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wildes The Importance of being Earnest, in her
line In a handbag!? might actually pronounce each of those three consecutive and very
differing consonants /ndb/, which ordinarily is quite difficult. However, in ordinary speech

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we would probably go for /hmbg/. Assimilation can be either regressive (looking

backwards), when a sound affects what comes before it as in the handbag example, where
the bilabial sound /b/ causes the nasal alveolar sound /n/ which comes before it, to be
articulated further forward in the mouth as the bilabial nasal /m/. Or, it can be progressive
(looking forwards), so that a preceding sound has an effect on the following sound. An
example of this is with the regular endings of past tense verbs, where a verb ending with a
voiced sound is followed by the voiced sound /d/ e.g. moved, or the unvoiced sound is
followed by the corresponding unvoiced sound /t/, as with danced. The third type of
assimilation is coalescence or coalescent assimilation, when both sounds affect each other,
as in the boundary between would and you in Would you? where the sounds /d/ and
/j/ coalesce into the sound //.

6.3 Catenation or Liaison

Liaison refers to the smooth linking or joining together of words in connected speech
Two words can have a silence between them, but liaison is concerned with the way sounds
are fused together at word boundaries. (Underhill 1994: 65). This is also referred to by some
writers as catenation from the Latin-based word for chain, or simply as linking.
Regardless of what overarching term is used, it is made up of a number of areas which we
will explore in the following section.

Intrusion

Say the phrase pie and chips at normal speed and then transcribe it using phonemic script.
Using the weak form of and, the phrase would be transcribed /pan(d)ps/. When said
without pausing, you may notice a /j/ occurring between pie and and /pajn(d)ps/.

This is an example of intrusion and the /j/ sound is referred to as an intrusive sound. There
are three intrusive sounds: /j/, /r/ and /w/. These occur between two vowel boundaries and
help link the vowel sounds together smoothly. An example of intrusive /r/ is China and
Japan /anrnpn/ with an intrusive r between the schwa at the end of China and
the schwa or //at the beginning of and. An intrusive /w/ occurs in go away /gwwe/.
The vowel boundary in this case is the // at the end of go and the schwa at the start of
away.

Consonant Vowel Linking

The examples of liaison or catenation we have just looked at involve intrusion, the intrusion
of an extra phoneme to facilitate articulation, but catenation or liaison can occur without
any intrusion taking place. Consider the utterance In a minute Ill be leaving for Listen to
what happens to in and a when said at normal speed and what happens between the /t/
of minute and Ill. It is hard for a learner to distinguish where exactly the word boundaries
are as a result of the linking of the final consonant sound with the initial vowel sound.
Learners may think they have heard the words inner /n/ and tile /tal/ instead or even
something like inner mini tile /nmntal/. Maybe students have asked you why you start
your lessons by mentioning festivals? In fact you are saying first of all /f:stv:l/ and not
festival /festvl/ but they could be forgiven for the misunderstanding.

Juncture

First of all and festival whilst sounding similar are transcribed differently. However, some
utterances are phonemically identical but there are two possible interpretations of the
sounds heard, consider I scream and ice cream or send the maid and send them aid or

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mice pies and my spies. The transcriptions are the same for each pair, /askrim/,
/sen(d)med/ and /maspaz/, but a listener would probably still be able to distinguish
which one was being said. As Adrian Underhill (1994: 94) describes it thus: Juncture is the
label given to a number of features which may occur at the boundary between two words in
connected speech such that, even though the two words may be linked together, the
boundary between them is nevertheless unambiguous and clear. Native speakers are able
to produce some very small adjustments to their pronunciation which enable us to
distinguish between these phrases. There is often a slight pause between sounds but also
slight changes in stress as well as subtle changes to the quality of the phonemes themselves.
However, the most useful guide to help distinguish between, for example, I scream and ice
cream is of course the context.

6.4 Elision

Another effect of fast speech is elision, where similar sounds occurring together result in one
sound being omitted, or elided. Go back to your transcription of pie and chips, perhaps you
come up with something like /pajnps/. If so, youll have omitted the final d of and. This
is an example of elision. It simplifies the consonant cluster occurring between and chips by
omitting the /d/ phoneme. Elision often occurs with the consonant sounds /t/ and /d/,
consider the phrases next please, old man and first day. It can also work within words as
with the omission of the schwa in suppose /spz/.

6.5 Weak forms

If a word is unstressed it often appears in its weak form. For example can might be
pronounced /kn/ but it is probably more often pronounced /kn/ with the weak form
using a schwa sound, the commonest vowel sounds in English. It is towards this sound that
the vowels in many common, unstressed non-content words conform when they are
unstressed. The following words, for example, are more often that not used in their weak
form, surprising though some of them may seem.

and, than, to, that, must, but, are, of, from, them, some, shall, was, does,
can, are all most often pronounced with a //.

The reduction of the vowel to a schwa is the most common way to form weak forms,
however, there are other vowel sounds which can be weak. For example:

/i/ to // as in been /bn/

/u/ to // as in you /j/

In both cases there can be further weakening to a schwa e.g. /bn/ and /j/.

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Task 5: Weak forms (10mins)

Look at the following and mark all the weak forms:

We took her along and we sat and waited for her. When we were told shed got in we
went down to meet the other girls. They were really nice but I said to Emma: You can
always come home Im only a phone call away) And that was it. When their first single,
Wannabe, went to No 1 it was, like, just amazing. I suppose its like when you win the
raffle. It was a family occasion and a friend brought some champagne aroundwhich
was something we never had.

7 Teaching Connected Speech

7.1 Some Issues concerning the Teaching of Connected Speech

While it might be possible to focus in some detail on individual phonemes, study of

connected speech is more of a challenge. There are indeed particular reasons why focus on
features of connected speech is difficult:

The first is familiar. We discussed it under the teaching of sentence stress. In order to focus
on features of connected speech we have to look at the details. But this is self-defeating
because looking at the details may make us lose sight of what happens at speed. If our
students think about them too much then they will tend to give their full strong form value
when they say them. The emphasis has to be on fluency.

But here lies our second problem: the normal description of the features of connected
speech is necessarily a description of native speaker speech. Things happen because we are
speaking with certain fluency, a fluency which, almost certainly, the learner is not capable
of. Some teachers believe in teaching their elementary learners to say, from the very
beginning: /welv/ for where do you live? A case can be made for this. Certainly a
student who has learned to say with caution where-do-you-live may indeed have difficulty
in speeding up and saying /welv/. On the other hand, will the student ever be
accurately fluent enough for these features to happen? In turn it could be argued that they
will reach fluency only if they are given the means to do so, that is, features of connected
speech. Thus we come full circle. However, it can also be argued that knowing how the
phrase may be said by a fluent speaker will help with recognition and perhaps it is in the
area of recognition that teaching connected speech comes into its own, rather than in
production.

Top-down and bottom-up are terms generally applied to the way in which we approach
the components of a text. Typically top-down would focus on overall knowledge or
awareness of the text type, our expectations as we approach the text and so on.
Bottom-up would approach the message of the text primarily through its language
components. With caution the same terms might be applied to how we approach
analysis of phonology. Do we see the utterance top-down, as a whole, holistically? Or do
we approach its constituents, bottom up atomistic ally?

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An excellent discussion significantly entitled Should we teachaspects of connected

speech? can be found in Kelly (op cit). The author interestingly raises the issue that
some students have the idea that features of connected speech such as contractions,
weak forms etc. are a kind of laziness or sloppiness. His conclusion appears to be that
while we may not be able to make our students reproduce the features of connected
speech outlined in this section it is nonetheless worth attempting to do so because it is
a very good way of enhancing students understanding of fast and fluent connected
speech i.e. it helps their listening. Jenkins (1998; 2000; 2007) has also argued against
teaching native-speaker models of pronunciation for learners. She believes that
focusing on nuclear stress is critical for learners, but that other aspects of connected
speech can be relegated, perhaps to specialist pronunciation classes.

Clearly a modest amount of attention to features of connected speech must be part of

our pronunciation teaching. Ideally it should be integrated into all language focus.
Furthermore attention to the features of spoken language can only be done in its natural
habitat, so to speak; that is at natural speed.

Below are samples of materials for the teaching of features of connected speech: firstly
recognition and discrimination.

Recognition

The first concerns schwa, the most common feature of connected speech. The schwa is
often just an unstressed syllable within a word irrespective of whether that word is said
alone or within an utterance e.g. accommodation on its own versus Have you got any
accommodation? In both situations accommodation is pronounced /kmden/ with
three schwas. So here it is not what happens around the word that causes the sounds to be
weakened.

But in Im looking for accommodation, for is pronounced /f/ i.e. it is a weak form not its
strong form /f:/, sometimes called the citation form. This is because its pronunciation has
been affected by the co-text around it and where stress falls within the utterance. This
schwa is, therefore, a feature of connected speech.

Fletcher, C. & OConnor J. D. 1989 Sounds English Longman (p88)

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Below is another example activity focussing on connected speech. It is initially recognition

based but subsequently productive.

From Cunningham, S. and Bowler, B. Headway Intermediate Pronunciation OUP p82

Note: this activity also involves intonation. It is important to recall that there is no
separation of intonation from all the aforementioned features of connected speech,
although intonation itself will be dealt with in its own section.

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Below is a further example of focus on some of the features of connected speech described
above. See if you can identify which features are being examined here:

Fletcher, C. & OConnor J. D. 1989 Sounds English Longman (p86)

Production

Most exercises concerning features of connected speech necessarily focus on production.

Indeed production of strings of connected speech is at the heart of modern language
teaching. We are working on production of connected speech the very moment we drill a
sentence; for in drilling there is an emphasis on speed and naturalness. If students
concentrate on producing the strong syllables and repeat at a good speed, the weak
syllables will sometimes be formed naturally.

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Task 7: Features of Connected Speech in Pronunciation Materials (30mins)

(Optional)

Here is a list of connected speech activities taken from the two listed books. If you do
not have copies of these books available, you can still do this exercise.

Headway Intermediate Pronunciation

English Aloud Book 2

Look at the lists below and make a brief note of what features of connected speech lie
behind each of these heading.

Headway Intermediate Pronunciation

Contractions of the verb to be (for example here the issues would be multiple!)

Weak forms of would you and do you

Weak forms of was and were

Contractions and weak forms with shall and Ill

Word linking

Asas

Weak forms of for

Modals of obligation in connected speech

Contractions of will and would

Can and cant in connected speech etc.

English Aloud Book 2

Weak forms with must.

Predicting the Stresses

Weak forms and word linking, stressed and unstressed auxiliaries

Weak forms of will

Sentence stress with would have been

Looking at the above areas try to work out in each case what the connected speech
issues will be under each topic. For example under weak forms with must, the
connected speech issues would be the weakening of /mst/ to /mst/ or in some cases
with elision of /t/,/ms/, or alternatively the strengthening of it to /mst/ for a final
answer; the fact that there is no weakening in the negative etc. When you have
identified what you think the issues will be and post your ideas in the forums.

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8 Terminology Review
Can you identify the terms or concepts being defined below?

Example: A unit of pronunciation which is (usually) longer than a sound, but (usually) less
than a word SYLLABLE.

1. A phonological phenomenon whereby a sound alters due to the influence of a preceding

or following sound. For example, the n in Green Park is articulated as /m/ due to the
following /p/.

2. The process of squeezing together the syllables that occur between stressed syllables,
so that each segment of an utterance takes the same time to produce.

3. A language where stressed syllables tend to occur at regular intervals and syllables are
not assigned the same stress.

4. A word consisting of a single syllable.

5. The effect of emphasising certain syllables by making them louder or longer, or by

increasing their pitch.

6. A language where each syllable tends to take the same length of time to say.

7. The omission of sounds / syllables because a similar sound occurs immediately

afterwards, e.g. the ed at the end of walked disappears in I walked to work.

See Appendix 1

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Reading:
If you would like to explore this area further:

Suggested Reading

One of the following:

Kenworthy, J. 1987 Teaching English Pronunciation Longman

Kelly, G, 2000 How to Teach Pronunciation Longman

Underhill, A. 1994 Sound Foundations Heinemann

Additional Reading

Dalton & Seidlehofer 1994 Pronunciation Oxford University Press

Roach P 2001 English Phonetics and Phonology OUP

Jenkins, J. 1998 Which pronunciation norms and models for English as an International
Language? ELT Journal 52/2

Jenkins, J. 2000 The phonology of English as an International Language Oxford University

Press

Jenkins, J. 2007 English as Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity Oxford University Press

For use with students:

Bowler B. & Cunningham S. 1991, Headway Upper-Intermediate Pronunciation OUP

Cunningham, S. and Bowler, B. 1990, Headway Intermediate Pronunciation OUP

Cunningham, S. and Moor P. 1996, Headway Elementary Pronunciation OUP

Hancock, M. 1995, Pronunciation Games Cambridge University Press

Hancock, M. 2003, English Pronunciation in Use Cambridge University Press

Haycraft, B. 1994 English Aloud 1 and 2 Heinemann

OConnor, J. D. & Fletcher, C.1989 Sounds English Longman

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Appendices
Appendix 1 Terminology Review

1. ASSIMILATION

2. ACCOMMODATION

3. STRESS-TIMED LANGUAGE

4. MONOSYLLABLE

5. STRESS, or PROMINENCE

6. SYLLABLE-TIMED LANGUAGE

7. ELISION

Return to text.

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