Prosody

1. Prosody Juan Torres Ampuero Phonetics Lecturer Universidad Autónoma de Chile

2. Definition • In the British tradition, the term prosody is preferred to refer to features which ‘are not indicated in a segmental transcription’ and which ‘may extend over varying domains: sometimes over relatively short stretches of utterances, like one syllable or one morpheme or one word […]; sometimes over […] one phrase, or one clause, or one sentence’ (Cruttenden, 1997: 1).

3. Prosodic features rhythm accent • Non-Lexical intonation tempo pause

4. Rhythm • Speech is perceived as a sequence of events in time, and the word rhythm is used to refer to the way these events are distributed in time. In conversational speech the rhythms are vastly more complicated, but it is clear that the timing of speech is not random. English rhythm is said to exhibit isochrony because it is believed that it tends to preserve equal intervals of time between stressed syllables irrespective of the number of syllables that come between them.

5. Stress-timed rhythm If the following sentence were said with isochronous stresses, the four syllables 'both of them are' would take the same amount of time as 'new' and 'here': 'Both of them are 'new 'here. This kind of timing is known as stress-timed rhythm and is based on the notion of the foot.

6. Syllable-timed rhythm • It is possible to claim that some languages tend to preserve a constant quantity for all syllables in an utterance: this is said to result in a syllable-timed rhythm. French, Spanish and Japanese have been claimed to be of this type. • It seems that in languages characterised as stress-timed there is a tendency for unstressed syllables to become weak, and to contain short, centralised vowels, whereas in languages described as syllable-timed unstressed vowels tend to retain the quality and quantity found in their stressed counterparts.

7. Rhythm group / foot Let us look at the following example: 'What’s the 'difference between a 'sick 'elephant and a 'dead 'bee? Notice in the above example that the number of syllables in each foot varies considerably: 2, 5, 1, 5, 1, 1. It should not, however, be thought that all the syllables within a foot are of equal duration –a stressed syllable is generally longer than an unstressed one, particularly if the latter has a reduced vowel.

8. Rhythm group / foot (continued) Here’s another example: There’s a 'dreadful din 'coming from 'Dan’s 'workshop. Starting from ‘dread-’ there are 3, 3, 1 and 2 syllables in each foot. But we have so far not taken account of any unstressed syllables at the beginning of an utterance. In this case, there are two such syllables in ‘There’s a’. These syllables are part of the anacrusis. The general tendency in English is to produce syllables in an anacrusis with greater speed than any unstressed syllables within following feet; hence also such syllables are extremely liable to be reduced.

9. References • Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation. Cambridge, CUP. • Hortiz-Lira, H. (2008). Prosodic Phonology. Santiago, UMCE / USACH. • Roach, P. (2011). Glossary - A little Encyclopaedia of Phonetics. http://www.cambridge.org/other_files/cms/PeterRoach/PeterRoach_Glossary.pdf