nglish Pronunciation for Comunication A Practical Course for Students of English By Wang guizhen Faculty of English Language Culture Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
English Pronunciation for Communication A Practical Course for Students of English By Wang Guizhen Faculty of English Language & Culture Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
The Learning of rhythmic structure in English Utterances
The Learning of Rhythmic structure in English Utterances
Speech rhythm ypothesIs: two types of meter in the worlds languages Stress-timing and syllable-timing Stress-timing: Equal intervals between prominent syllables Prototypical languages: English, Dutch. German Syllable-timing equal syllable durations Prototypical languages: French, Spanish All languages of the world are said to fall into one group or the other
Hypothesis: two types of meter in the world’s languages: Stress-timing and syllable-timing Stress-timing: Equal intervals between prominent syllables Prototypical languages: English, Dutch, German Syllable-timing Equal syllable durations Prototypical languages: French, Spanish All languages of the world are said to fall into one group or the other Speech Rhythm
Empirical evidence? But no acoustic evidence for meter in speech Stress-timed languages: intervals between stressed syllables not equal Syllable-timed languages: successive syllables not equal in length Nor are intervals between stressed languages more regular in stressed than in syllable-timed languages a But languages do sound rhythmically different-why?
◼ But no acoustic evidence for meter in speech Stress-timed languages: intervals between stressed syllables not equal Syllable-timed languages: successive syllables not equal in length ◼ Nor are intervals between stressed languages more regular in stressedthan in syllable-timed languages ◼ But languages do sound rhythmically different - why? Empirical evidence?
Speech rhythm What is it that makes rhythm language specific? Not meter Meter is a concept taken from western music which has meter Linguists who have proposed that language has meter are from a European language background Alternative hypothesis: Languages sound rhythmically different because of different levels of acoustic-phonetic variability in the eech signal→→ variability in vowel durations
Speech rhythm ◼ What is it that makes rhythm language specific? ◼ Not meter ◼ Meter is a concept taken from western music which has meter ◼ Linguists who have proposed that language has meter are from a European language background ◼ Alternative hypothesis: Languages sound rhythmically different because of different levels of acoustic-phonetic variability in the speech signal variability in vowel durations