‫ الـرسـم الصـوتـي ِفــي هٰـذا الفـصـل مـطـلـوب‬: ‫مـالحـظـة‬

CHAPTER 14 | ‫الفـصـل الـرابـع عـشـر‬

Rhythm : is an aspect of connected speech it involves some noticeable event
happening at regular intervals of time. Such as the rhythm of heartbeat, of a
flashing Light, or of a piece of music.

English speech is rhythmical, why?

A/ because it happening at regular intervals of time.
Or, rhythm is detectable in the regular occurrence of stressed syllables. It is not
suggested that the timing is as regular as a clock : regularity of occurrence is
only relative.
We have two theories : ‫النظريات‬
1.Stress – timed rhythm : implies that stressed syllables will tend to occur at
relatively regular intervals whether they are separated by Unstressed syllables
or not. ( Russian, Arabic, English languages)
Or stress – timed rhythm : it states that the times from each stressed syllable to
the next will tend to be the same, irrespective of the number of intervening
Unstressed syllables. ( Russian, Arabic, English languages).

2. Syllable – timed rhythm : in the languages ( French, Telugu, Yoruba) all the
syllable, whether stressed or Unstressed. Tend to occur at regular time intervals
and the time between stressed syllables will be Shorter or longer in proportion
to the number of Unstressed syllables.

Foot : is a Unit of rhythm, The foot begins with stressed syllable and includes all
the following Unstressed syllables up to (but not including) the following
stressed syllable. For example : ( ‫( المثال مطلوب مع التعريف‬
 :👇🏻 ‫ يكون هكذا‬foot ‫منطوق السؤال في االمتحان بالنسبة لـ‬

Q/ Divide the following sentences up into feet :

: ‫عند الحل‬
)‫ تبدأ بالمقاطع المشددة‬foot ‫( ألن الـ‬stressed syllables ‫ اوالً نقوم بتحديد المقاطع المشددة‬.١
ٰ ‫ نحدد األرقام والخطوط على‬،ً‫ ثانيا‬.٢
‫ يفصله عن‬،‫على اساس التشديد (عند بداية كل تشديد نضع خط قبله‬
) ‫المقطع اآلخر‬
ٰ ‫مثالً التشديد‬
.‫ سيكون خط فاصل بينهما وهكذا‬.' down ‫ ' وبعدها بدأ بكلمة‬walk ‫على كلمة‬

Some feet are stronger than others. Producing strong- weak patterns

The phrase ‘twenty places’, where ‘places’ normally carries stronger stress Than
‘twenty’ (i.e. is rhythmically stronger). We can make our “tree diagram” grow to
look Like this:
Assimilation : is an aspect of connected speech. It is a case where we find
phoneme realized differently as a result of being near some other words
phoneme belonging to neighbouring words.
The way that sounds belonging to one word can cause a changes in sounds
belonging to neighbouring words.

Where do we find assimilation? And why?

It is more likely to be found in rapid casual speech and less likely in slow, careful
speech.
In order to make our pronunciation/speech easier.

Sometimes the difference caused by assimilation is very noticeable, and

sometimes is very slight.

Cf (consonant final position) = a case where two words are combined, the first
of which ends with a single final consonant.

Ci (consonant initial position) = the second which starts with a single initial
consonant.

There are two types of assimilation :

1. Regressive assimilation (if Cf changes to become like Ci) : it is a type of
assimilation in which the phoneme that comes first is effected by the one that
comes after it. For example : that person /ðæp pɜ:sn̩ /
2. Progressive assimilation (if Ci changes to become like Cf) : it is a type of
assimilation in which the phoneme that comes second is effected by the one
that comes before it. For example : get them /get̪ t̪əm/.

The main differences between consonants are of three types :

Differences in place of articulation
Differences in manner of articulation
Differences in voicing

We can identify assimilation of place, of manner, of voicing.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Assimilation of Place ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Assimilation of place is most clearly observable in some cases where a final

Consonant (Cf) with alveolar place of articulation is followed by an initial
consonant (Ci) With a place of articulation that is not alveolar. (Cf) = Alveolar +
Ci = non Alveolar. For example, the final consonant in ‘that’ ðæt is alveolar t.

1. In rapid, casual speech the t will become p before a bilabial

consonant ( p, b, m) as in :
That person /ðæp pɜ:sn̩ /
That man / ðæp mæn/
Meat pie /mi:p paɪ/

2. t will change to a dental plosive, before Dental consonants (θ ,ð)

for which the phonetic symbol is t̪ , as in:
That thing /ðæt̪ θɪŋ /
Get those /get̪ ðəʊz/
Cut through /kʌt̪ θru:/
3. t will become k Before a velar consonant (k, g, ŋ) as in :
That case /ðæk keɪs/
Bright colour /braɪk kʌlə/
Quite good /kwaɪk gʊd/

4. d will become b ( when followed by bilabial). Good boy /gʊb bɔɪ/

– d will become d̪ (when followed by Dental). Bad thing /bæd̪ θɪŋ/
– d will become g ( when followed by Velar). Card game /ka:g geɪm/

5. n will become m (when followed by bilabial) green paper /gri:m peɪpə/

– n will become n̪ ( when followed by Dental) fine thought /faɪn̪ θɔ:t/.
– n will become ŋ ( when followed by Velar) ten girls /teŋ gɜ:lz/.

6. S will become ʃ when followed by ʃ or j : This shoe /ðɪʃ ʃu:/

–. Z will become ʒ when followed by ʃ or j : those years /ðəʊʒ jɪəz/

It is important to note That the consonants that have undergone

assimilation have not disappeared. ‫مالحظة مهمة‬

Assimilation of place is only noticeable in this regressive assimilation

of alveolar consonants.
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Assimilation of manner‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Assimilation of manner is much less noticeable, and is only found in
the most rapid And casual speech; generally speaking, the tendency is
again for regressive assimilation.
And the change in manner is most likely to be towards an “easier”
consonant – one which makes less obstruction to the airflow.
It is thus possible to find cases where a final Plosive becomes a
fricative or nasal.
Final plosive —» fricative or nasal

‘that side’ ðæs saɪd, ‘good night’ gʊn naɪt

but Most unlikely that a final fricative or nasal would become a

plosive.
In one particular Case we find progressive assimilation of manner,
when a word-initial ð follows a plosive Or nasal at the end of a
preceding word. : it is very common to find that the Ci becomes
Identical in manner to the Cf but with dental place of articulation.
If we have plosive or nasal + followed by ð, the assimilation would be
Progressive.
‘in the’ in ðə —» in̪ n̪ə
‘get them’ get ðem —» get̪ t̪əm
‘read these’ ri:d ði:z —» ri:d̪ d̪ i:z
 ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Assimilation of voice‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Assimilation of voice is also found, but again only in a limited way.
Only regressive Assimilation of voice is found across word boundaries,

If Cf is a lenis “voiced” consonant and Ci is fortis (“voiceless”) we

often find that the lenis “voiced” consonant has no voicing;
for example in ‘I have to’ the final v becomes voiceless f because of
The following voiceless t in aɪ hæf tu .

and in the same way the z in ‘cheese’ tʃi:z becomes More like s when
it occurs in ‘cheesecake’ tʃi:skeɪk.
fixed assimilation ‫النوع األول من‬

assimilation fixed :is a type of assimilation because it is as part of the

phonological structure of English syllables, since exceptions are
almost non-existent. ( ‫( المثال مطلوب مع التعريف‬
An example of assimilation that has become fixed is the progressive
Assimilation of voice with the suffixes s, z.

1.when a verb carries a third person singular ‘-s’ Suffix,

2. or a noun carries an ‘-s’ plural suffix
3. or an ‘-’s’ possessive suffix,
that suffix will be Pronounced as :
1. S = if the preceding consonant is fortis (“voiceless”)
cats /kæts/... jumps /dʒʌmps/… Pat’s /pæts/
2. Z = if the preceding Consonant is lenis (“voiced”).
Dogs /dɒgz/ ... Runs /rʌnz/ ...Pam’s /pæmz/
👇🏻 fixed assimilation ‫النوع الثاني من‬
if in a syllable-final consonant cluster a nasal consonant precedes a
plosive or a fricative in the same morpheme, then the place of
articulation of the nasal is always determined by the place of
articulation of the other consonant;
‘bump’ bʌmp / ‘tenth’ ten̪ θ,
‘hunt’ hʌnt / ‘bank’ bæŋk.
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Elision : is an aspect of connected speech. It is a case where a sound
disappear, may be realized as zero or have zero realization or be
deleted. Elision is typical of rapid casual speech.
There are cases of elision :
1.Loss of weak vowel after p, t, k.
In words like potato’, ‘tomato’, canary’, ‘perhaps’, ‘today’
Potato pʰˈteɪtəʊ | tomato tʰˈma:təʊ
Canary kʰˈneəri |perhaps pʰˈhæps | today tʰˈdeɪ

2. Weak vowel + n, l, r becomes syllabic consonant

Tonight tn̩ ɑɪt | polie pl̩i:s | Correct kr̩ekt
3. Avoidance of complex consonant clusters.
English speaker would not ever pronounce all The consonants
between the last two words of the following:
‘George the Sixth’s throne’ dʒɔ:dʒ ðə sɪksθs θrəʊn
Though this is not impossible to pronounce, sɪksθrəʊn or sɪksrəʊn is a
more likely pronunciation for the last two words.
In clusters of Three plosives or two plosives plus a + fricative, the
middle plosive may disappear,
Acts æks | looked back lʊk bæk | scripts skrɪps

4. Loss of final v in ‘of’ before consonants; for example:

‘lots of them’ lɒts ə ðəm, | ‘waste of money’ weɪst ə mʌni
‫مالحظة‬
It is difficult to know whether contractions (‫ ( االختصارات‬of grammatical
words should be regarded As examples of elision or not.
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Linking : is an aspect of connected speech refers to a case where

words are linked or connected together by means of linking r and
Intrusive r.

Linking r : is an aspect of connected speech, in which we link words

together, the phoneme r does not occur in syllable- final position in
the BBC accent, but when the spelling of a word suggests a final r and
word beginning with a vowel follows , usual pronunciation would
pronounce r. In order to make our pronunciation easier and no pause.
For example : here are hɪər ə | four eggs fɔ:r egz.
Intrusive r : is a case of linking or an aspect of connected speech,
when we use r to link words ending with a vowel even if r is not from
the spelling, in order to make our pronunciation easier and no pause.
For example : ‘Formula A’ fɔ:mjələr eɪ
‘Australia all out’ ɒstreɪliər ɔ:l ɑʊt
‘media event’ mi:diər ɪvent

Linking r and Intrusive r are special cases of Juncture.

Juncture : it is the relationship between one sound and the sounds

that Immediately precede and follow it.

There are two types of Juncture :

1. Close Juncture : my turn mɑɪ tɜ:n
m and ɑɪ are close Juncture because it is in the same word, and
because it is a relationship between sounds in the same word.

2. Open Juncture : my turn mɑɪ tɜ:n

aɪ and t are open Juncture because it is a relationship between one
sound from a word and another sound from another word.