Week 8: Prominence

This blog post focuses on my deliberate practice on prominence, which is one of the features of pronunciation that is closely connected to speakers' intent. Prominence shows the listener the highlight or the most important part in speakers utterances. This feature is actually closely related to intonation, in that intonation is used to show the prominence in a thought group or also called intonation unit (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). An utterance may have more than one thought groups, and knowing the thought groups in an utterance is helpful in deciding the prominent word/words in each utterance. Thought groups have these characteristics in spoken English:

1. Pauses separate one thought group from another;
2. There is only one prominent element or word in each thought group;
3. Each thought group has its own intonation pattern; each utterance may have more than one thought group; 
4. Each thought group usually has a grammatically coherent structure.

Based on my reading, I found it helpful to know that prominence stress is given to the stressed syllable of the most important word in a thought group. The common placements of prominence in a thought group are on words:

1. expressing new information

     e.g. 

            X: I've lost an umBRELla

            Y: A LAdy's umbrella?

            X: Yes. A lady's umbrella with STARS on it. GREEN stars. 

          

In the above example taken from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010: 223), the capitalized letters mark the prominences. It can be seen that the prominence on the first line is on the word umbrella; and since the stressed syllable in umbrella is the second syllable, that syllable receive the prominent stress. Then, on the second line, the new information is on the word lady; therefore, the prominence stress is put on the first syllable of that word. The same goes to the third line, where the prominence stresses goes on the words containing new information, that is, stars and green.  

2. carrying special emphasis on a particular thing --> emphatic stress

     e.g.

            A: How do you like that new computer you bought?

            B: I'm REAlly enjoying it!

The example from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) above shows that the speaker wants to emphasize "a strong degree of enjoyment" (p.223)

3. showing two contrastive things --> contrastive stress

     e.g.

            "Is this a LOW- or a HIGH-impact aerobic class?

the words low and high in the example above show contrast, so they both get prominence stress.  

Below is the example of my analysis on my archetype concerning the prominence. 

After learning about the word-level stress, the sentence-level stress, followed by rhythm, I found it easier for me to understand prominence. For the next blog post, I will focus on intonation which is still closely related to this blog post.

References:

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D.M., & Goodwin, J.M. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book 

         and reference guide (2nd Ed). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.