SUMMARY

Plantilla resumenes.dot

ENGLISH

TOPIC 9: PHONOLOGIAL
SYSTEM OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE III: ACCENT,
RHYTHM AND INTONATION.
THE DIPHTHONGS.
COMPARISON WITH THE
PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF
DOCUMENTO3

THE CORRESPONDING
AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITY
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INDEX

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 3
1. THE NATURE OF SPEECH .................................................................... 4
1.1. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY BELONG TO DIFFERENT FIELDS ....... 4
2. STRESS .......................................................................................... 6
2.1. AFFIXES, FUNCTIONAL VARIATIONS AND COMPOUND WORDS ....... 6
2.2. SENTENCE STRESS ...................................................................... 7
3. RHYTHM ....................................................................................... 8
4. INTONATION ................................................................................ 9
4.1 FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION...................................................... 9
4.2 MEANING OF THE TONE .......................................................... 10
4.3. INTONATION UNIT ................................................................... 11
5. COMPARING ENGLISH AND SPANISH PHONOOGICAL
SYSTEMS ......................................................................................12
CONCLUSION ..................................................................................15

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INTRODUCTION

Teaching pronunciation is a fundamental feature of successful communication

(Eva Roid, 2016). When we study English is important to study its vocalic system

in order to understand the differences between English and Spanish as well as

the organ involved in its production, in order to facilitate its realization. In fact,

the Common European Framework recommends teaching pronunciation from

the very beginning.

For that purpose, a revision of concepts such as phonetics and phonology will

be carried out. After that, we will analyse stress in words in isolation as well as

sentences together with rhythm and intonation. Finally, we will compare the

English and the Spanish phonological systems.

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1. THE NATURE OF SPEECH

Speech is the ability of expressing thoughts, perceptions and feelings by artic-

ulating word through oral and nasal sounds (Webster’s College Dictionary).

Speech sounds can be classified into: individual sounds, glides (incidental tran-

sitory sounds) and prosodies (suprasegmental features).

The notion of speech involves not just individual sounds (phones, lineal fea-

tures…) but also connected sounds, whose variations go from ellipsis (/r/ in

hose) to a long degree. Semantically, length is a distinctive feature.

1.1. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY BELONG

TO DIFFERENT FIELDS
Phonetics is the study of sounds and their production transmission and recep-

tion, their analysis and classification and transcription (The Dictionary.com).

Phonetics studies speech sounds according to their production in the vocal

organs, their physical properties or their effect on the ear (auditory phonetics).

Phonetics deals with phonemes as semantic entities, the evolution of sounds

and the range of ways to articulate sound.

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Phonology focuses on the study of the distribution and patterning of speech

sounds in a language and the rules governing language pronunciation (The

Dictionary.com). It attempts to account for how speech sounds are combined

and organised to convey meaning. It deals with physiology of sounds, the

speaking and the selection and patterns of sounds.

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2. STRESS

Stress can be defined as the force with which a sound or syllable is uttered.

The effect of stress on a syllable is that vowels are longer and more voiced.

When unstressed, a weakening of the vowel is produced. There are three ways

to make a syllable unstressed: devoicing consonants, moving the tongue closer

to the roof of the mouth and shortening the relative length of the sound.

There are no general stress rules, although some of them are:

a) Two - syllables words: long vowel usually receives the primary stress:

mother, panic…but yellow, female…

b) Three – syllables words: last syllable with long vowel gets the stress:

comprehend…or if the long vowel is in the second syllable ( attention).

c) Four – syllables words: penultimate syllable with long vowel gets the

stress combination. Otherwise, the syllable before that: America.

2.1. AFFIXES, FUNCTIONAL VARIATIONS AND

COMPOUND WORDS
- Prefixes: words with prefixes have a stress on the prefix an on the word

itself: anti-climax, archbishop, prepaid…

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- Suffixes: they do not affect the stress of the root: swimming, worker, fash-

ionable…

- Functional variations: some words vary according to their function: abstract,

contrasts… nouns usually take the stress on the first syllable while verbs do

it on the second.

- Compound words: they can take only one primary stress, normally on the

first element of the compound: blackbird (not obvious meaning) vs postman

(obvious meaning).

- Compound adjectives and nouns plus an adverb also has stress on both

elements: blue-eyed, passer-by…

2.2. SENTENCE STRESS

When words form sentences stressed syllables may become unstressed, stress

may be moved onto another syllable etc.

Generally speaking, two stressed syllables together are uncommon in rapid

speech.

- Content words: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs usually have stress.

- Form words: auxiliaries, conjunctions, pronouns, articles, are not normally

stressed.

Empathic and contrastive stress: stress is also used to produce illocutionary

effect: I told you NOT to put the keys on the TABLE.

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3. RHYTHM

It can be defined as the regular succession of strong and weak stress in the

utterance. Two key concepts are: weak and strong forms and rhythmic group.

a) Weak and strong forms. Weak forms are usually stressed and shortened

and graphically reduce in form: I’ve. They can be detected by the presence

of the schwa. Stressed syllables can never

b) Rhythmic group. It is an alternation of weak and strong syllables: John and

his wife are on holiday. The most important stressed syllable is the last one,

which is called the nucleus which suffers variations.

The features of the rhythmic units are:

o They can occur at fairly equal intervals of time.

o Unaccented syllables generally correlate with grammatical word-clus-

ters.

o A rhythmic division will not normally fall within a word-pattern.

o Several words may combine to form a rhythmic group.

o Unaccented words may be equally well assigned to either the pre-

ceding or the following group.

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4. INTONATION

It is described as how the voice rises and fall in speech and how this affects

meaning. The sentence or tone unit it is raining can be a question or a state-

ment according to the intonation.

Intonation can convey not only a difference between a question and a statement

purely by a change in pitch, but it is used to communicate the type and strength

or an emotion, using melody and range.

4.1 FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION

a) Attitudinal: intonation is used to reflect the attitude of a person. Factors

such as speed of talking, loudness or non-linguistic elements contribute.

Fall/Rise intonation describe where the pitch is while high/low intonation

describe where the melody starts.

b) Grammatical: intonation is used as a kind of punctuation, which may or

may not coincide with the actual written forms. Pauses and rises indicate

that the utterance is not completed: When we arrive ^ it was snowing.

It also indicates interrogatives, exclamations and verb objects: He left

and took his hat.

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c) Accentual: it highlights the most important words in an utterance, in

conjunction with stress and the nucleus which usually comes with a

change of pitch: JOHN likes fish (but his wife doesn’t).

d) Discourse: it discriminates new information and it inserts subordinate

information.

4.2 MEANING OF THE TONE

It is indicated by means of four melodies:

a) Fall. It I the most neutral. It describes how the voice falls on the final

stressed syllable of a phrase. It is used for: statements (He is ENGLISH),

wh-questions (What’s the TIME?), commands (Come HERE), exclamation

(What an IDIOT!) and question tags.

b) Rise. It describes how the voice rises at the end of a phrase. There is a

low and high rise melody

o High rise: it is used to elicit repetition: WHEN did I go?

o Low rise: it is used for: yes/no questions (Are your SPANISH?), wh-

questions (Where is your MUM?), expressing reassurance (He won’t

BITE you), disagreeing (Yes, it IS) and question tags (John is on holi-

day, ISN’T he?

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c) Fall-rise. It describes how the voice falls and rises. It is very common in

English to indicate: a pause, reservation, or hesitation, apology, differ-

ence in opinion and also irony.

It is also required to request information or invite somebody to do or to

to have something in a polite way: Would you like another cake?

d) Rise-fall. This is not very common in English. It may be used to show

complacency, criticism or a challenge: I WILL if I can.

4.3. INTONATION UNIT

The intonation unit is formed by four elements:

- Nucleus: this is the last accented syllables, also called tonic-syllable: I told

you no to put the keys on the Table.

- Head: stressed syllables before the nucleus. They move down in step until

the nucleus: I TOLD you not to PUT the KEYS on the table.

- Pre-head: unstressed syllables before the head. They are often low in

pitch.

- Tail: unstressed syllables after the nucleus. If the tune is falling, they say

stay low, but if the tune is rising, they also rise: In a little less than an hour

every came.

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5. COMPARING ENGLISH AND

SPANISH PHONOOGICAL SYSTEMS

Spanish is a syllable-timed language. every syllable is produced by an expulsion

of air from the lungs. At the same time, speech muscles may or may not move.

When they do, they give more emphasis to that syllable. The penultimate sylla-

ble tends to be stressed.

The expulsion of air is organized so that it is regularly spaced and every syllable

occupies more or less the same amount of time; the stressed and unstressed

syllables depends on the number of syllables.

English is a stress-timed language and it has more variability with respect to

the position of word stress than Spanish. The movements of the speech muscles

are organised according to stressed syllables. The word stress in a sentence

depend on words importance: the more important a word the stronger stress it

takes.

English words can be stressed or unstressed in order to emphasize or contrast

the speakers’ intention: JOHN eats mean/ John EATS mean. In Spanish a differ-

ent structure is necessary: Es Juan el que come carne/ Juan sí come carne.

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In the absence of special emphasis, the most important words are: nouns, ad-

jectives, principal verbs, interrogative pronouns and adverbs. When all the words

are equally important, they all have strong stress.

In Spanish word stress is not regular. There are three types of word stress:

On the last syllable, on the syllable before the last and on the antepenultimate.

There are orthographic rules that help to predict the spelling of unknown words.

In English the stress is not regular either, it must be learnt. There are not general

rules to determine word stress: photograph, photography…

Some specific rules are:

- Most words of two syllables have one strongly stressed syllable and one

weak one: increase (n), insult (n)…

- Words that can also be used as verbs change the stress: increase (v), insult

(v)…

- There are some cases in which both syllables have strong stress: fifteen,

Dundee…

In general, Spanish words tend to be stressed later than English ones: Geogra-

phy/ geografía.

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Spanish has three main intonation patterns: declarative, interrogative and ex-

clamative, which correspond to statements, questions and exclamation. English

has four intonation patterns: fall, rise fall-rise and rise—fall.

In Spanish the rising tune is used in questions much more often than it is in

English. However, the fall-rise pattern is rarely used: comment clauses and ad-

verbials, which are incorporated into the intonation group in English, constitute

a separate unit: It’s getting late, you know.

In English there are 12 pure vowels that act as distinctive phonemes, half of

them are long, plus two semi-vowels. There are 21 diphthongs: 9 of them are

falling and 3 are rising.

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CONCLUSION

As seen English phonological systems differs pretty much from the Spanish one

so that make it accessible to our learners is the main issue. For that purpose,

we should offer opportunities and exposure to the English language whereby

receiving input and producing output. We have to design contextualize activities

and tasks which permit out students to become as closer as native-speakers

are. We should encourage our student to speak since the lowest level and

courses so that fear vanishes and avoid English language acquisition and pro-

ductio

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