SUPRASEGMENTAL ASPECTS OF PRONUNCIATION Backgrou

SUPRASEGMENTAL ASPECTS OF PRONUNCIATION

Vowels and consonants can be considered to be the segments of which speech is composed. Together they form syllables, which in turn make up utterances. Superimposed on the syllables there are other features that are known as suprasegmentals. These include variations in stress (accent) and pitch (tone and intonation). Variations in length are also usually considered to be suprasegmental features, although they can affect single segments as well as whole syllables. All of the suprasegmental features are characterized by the fact that they must be described in relation to other items in the same utterance. It is the relative values of the pitch, length, or degree of stress of an item that are significant. The absolute values are not linguistically important, although they may be of importance paralinguistically, in that they convey information about the age and sex of the speaker, his emotional state, and his attitude (Ladefoged, 1975, vol. 14, p. 278).

Segmental phonemes are realized by consonantal or vocalic segments of words, and they can be said to occur in a certain order relative to one another. However, nonsegmental (suprasegmental) aspects of the phonemic realization of words and utterances may also be functional. For example, the noun import differs from the verb import in that the former is accented on the first and the latter on the second syllable. This is called a stress accent: the accented syllable is pronounc

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(e.g. THAT is the END of the NEWS). As Knowles (1992) remarks: "Sentence stress is a misnomer, as the domain of these patterns is not the sentence but the tone group" (p. 989). There is contrastive stress, whereby stress is used to imply contrast (e.g. "MARY can go" or "Mary CAN go"). The rhythm of English leads to special reduced forms in some monosyllabic words in unstressed contexts: in context, the words an, from, his are usually reduced in degree of strength, such process of reduction often including the replacement of the vowel with a weak vowel (usually a schwa) and dropping an initial /h/. It is a common feature of English that when derivative words are formed by means of certain suffixes, the (primary) stress shifts from a particular syllable in the base word to a new syllable in the derived word (e.g. �tom/at=mic). Such stress shift or accent shift occurs only in words of French, Latin, and Greek background, in terms of particular suffixes, such as -ic, -ity, -al, and not in words of vernacular Germanic background (Knowles, 1992, p. 989). Intonation When speaking, people generally raise and lower the pitch of their voice, forming pitch patterns. They also give some syllables in their utterances a greater degree o

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