stress-timed
ADJECTIVE
(of a language) characterized by a rhythm in which primary stresses occur at
roughly equal intervals, irrespective of the number of unstressed syllables in
between. English is a stress-timed language.
Contrasted with syllable-timed
‘Native speakers do it automatically, but the speaker of a syllable-timed language who
tries to learn a stress-timed language will probably have great trouble mastering the
new arrangement of sound patterns.’
‘Many accents of English are said to display mainly stress-timed rhythm.’
‘There is not total agreement among linguists about the stress-timed nature of English.’
‘It is called the stress-timed rhythm of English.’
‘Japanese is probably the most perfect example of a syllable-timed language, but French
and Brazilian Portuguese are also syllable-timed while Russian and English are
markedly stress-timed languages.’
‘If syllables tend to be pronounced faster in longer words, van Santen suggests that this
may be because there is more phonetic redundancy in long words, rather than because
English is ‘stress-timed’.’
‘Therefore some researchers argue for a distinction between stress-timed languages and
syllable-timed languages.’
‘In other languages, which are not stress-timed the stress would fall more equally on each
word and syllable.’
syllable-timed
ADJECTIVE
(of a language) characterized by a rhythm in which syllables occur at roughly
equivalent time intervals, irrespective of the stress placed on them. French is a
syllable-timed language.
Contrasted with stress-timed
THE FORM OF INTONATION
The vocal cords vibrate during speech. This vibration is heard as a sound, and the pitch of this
sound varies according to the frequency of the vibration of the cords: the higher the frequency of
vibration the higher the pitch that you heard.
This pitch variation extends over single phonemes, sequences of phonemes and whole utterances.
The term intonation refers to the patterns that can be found within this pitch variation, and so
intonation can b defined as a “pattern of pitch variation”.
THE TONE UNIT
In order to study these continuous pitch variations more closely it is helpful to divided connected
speech into units of pitch. This units, called tone unit or tone group, enables us to isolate pitch
patterns by defining where one pattern ends and the next begins.
The tone unit contains a single complete pitch pattern. The smallest possible tone unit contains
only a tonic syllable but a tone group can also contain a tail, an onset, a head and a prehead.
‘My data shows that, due to a less complex syllable structure in syllable-timed languages,
c and v intervals are also produced at a far higher rate in these languages than in stress-
timed languages.’
‘Pronunciation difficulties of this kind are commonly found among those learners whose
native tongues are syllable-timed and open-syllabled.’
‘Native speakers do it automatically, but the speaker of a syllable-timed language who
tries to learn a stress-timed language will probably have great trouble mastering the
new arrangement of sound patterns.’
‘I don't know much about this subject, but wikipedia says Finnish is a syllable-timed
language, Japanese is mora-timed, and Dutch is stress-timed.’
‘Japanese is a syllable-timed language with a pitch accent.’
‘Learners whose mother tongue is phonemic or syllable-timed have particular problems.’
‘The teacher can show them a visual contrast between the two languages to indicate that
Chinese is syllable-timed while English is stress-timed.’
‘The proponents of the traditional rhythm typology say that stress-timed and syllable-
timed languages differ in several respects.’
‘Kato et al., on the other hand, report acceptability experiments which suggest that
Japanese may indeed be syllable-timed (or, strictly, ‘mora-timed’), so that lengthening a
consonant sounds best if compensated by shortening of the following vowel, and vice
versa.’
‘But an even more common error made by non-native speakers whose mother tongue is
syllable-timed is not reducing function words and other unstressed syllables enough.’
In order to study these continuous pitch variations
more closely it is helpful to divided connected speech into units of pitch. This units ,called tone
unit or tone group, enables us to isolate pitch patterns by defining where one pattern ends and
the next
-From this point of view one of the most important functions of intonation is making off syntactic
structures from each other , rather like the function of punctuation in writing but with a much
wider range of choices. This may help the listener to process the speech in its appropriate units
and it may also help the speaker to organize her speech. By dividing one structure from the next,
tone units indicate what structurally belongs to what.
There is a tendency for tone unit boundaries to occur at the boundaries between sentences,
clauses and phrases, especially in more careful colloquial speech (this is not always so clear in
rapid colloquial speech). It is certainly useful for learners to try to exploit this tendencyin their
speaker and listening .But the links between tone units and syntactic boundaries are very far short
of offering a full account of intonational meaning, since the link essentially focuses on the gaps
between tone units rather than on the pitch contours themselves.
