For this week, I focus my deliberate practice on intonation in Received Pronunciation. The same as prominence, intonation is also used by native speakers of English to emphasize important information in their utterances. Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) highlight that prominence and intonation is actually interact with each other in that the change of prominence in an utterance also changes the intonation pattern of the utterance. Before I started my practice, I reviewed the theories about intonation first for it would make it easier for me to hear it. Talking about intonation means talking about pitch, which Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) put it as "the relative highness or lowness of the speaker's voice" similar to musical pitch do, re, and mi (p.230). They distinguish 4 levels of pitch in English: 4 = extra high 3 = high 2 = middle 1 = low Usually, level 4 pitch is only used when someone has a strong feeling of something such as when she/he is surprised, enthusiastic, or in disbelief; and it is also often used in contrastive and emphatic stress. One alternates from low to high pitch, but she/he usually ends the utterance either using low or high pitch. One thing that I thing should be noted here is that intonation in English does not change the meaning of the word, unlike tonal language such as Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese in which the same word with different tone will carry different meaning. Instead, in English, changes in intonation will only reflect different discourse context of the utterance or even simply a word. The following example can help our understanding on pitch and intonation: Question: Now? --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question Command: Now! --> produced with falling pitch signifies a command or Statement: She's gone --> produced with falling pitch signifies a statement Question: She's gone --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question People can also use intonation to show they emotion. The examples given by Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) are different emotion that can be shown with the word great as follows: perfunctory --> produced with only slightly falling intonation or neutral enthusiasm --> produced with broader movement from high to low intonation sarcasm --> flatter intonation that may signify disinterest, or even sarcasm
When analyzing my archetype, I realized that the woman in my
archetype mostly employed the intonation pattern for statement since she is
reading a story of out a text. Here is my transcription for her intonation
patterns:
and here is my recording for this week after several practice
on intonation patterns:
For next week, I will focus my practice on the segmental
features or Received Pronunciation.
For this blog post, I focus on the rhythm of Received Pronunciation after my practice on word-level and sentence-level stresses last week. Working on English stress was not an easy thing for me to do since stress is not a significant feature in my native language, Indonesian. Indonesian is a syllable-timed language in which the length of an utterance depends more or less on the number of syllables in the utterance for each syllable has a fairly regular stress, whereas English is a stress-timed language in which the length of an utterance does not depend on the number of the syllables but rather on the number of stresses. Therefore, in English it is possible to have a sentence which has the same stress pattern as a multisyllabic word. These examples from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) provide good illustration on the similarities between the stress pattern of multisyllabic words with simple sentences:
Reflecting back to my previous recordings, I found out that most of my recordings are longer than my archetype which show that my pronunciation is still very much influenced by my native language especially on the stress pattern I assume. I probably still pronounced unstressed syllables longer than they should be. Thus, the practice on rhythm that I have been doing this week will be beneficial for me in enhancing my English pronunciation.
I started my deliberate practice by reading theories on rhythm first since I did not remember learning this specifically in college during my bachelor degree program. Discussion on rhythm is closely related to word and sentence level stresses in that rhythm is a combination of beat patterns of strongly stressed, lightly stressed and unstressed syllables and pauses (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). In other words, it involves stressing and de-stressing of syllables to create the musicality of the language. I learned that Native speakers of English rely on the distinction between these stressed and unstressed syllables when listen to people in that they focus more on the stressed syllables to get the meaning of the utterances. Therefore, failure to produce them correctly may hinder their understanding on the utterances. Thus, I realize that it is really important to learn the stress patterns of English as well as to teach these stress-timed nature or rhythm of English to EFL learners. The stressed-timed nature of English is well illustrated in this following figures from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010), and I found them useful for my drilling practices:
From these two figures, it can be seen that even though these sentences have different number of syllables, they have roughly the same length of time to pronounce since they have the same number of stressed elements. The consequence of this is the length of time to pronounce each stressed syllable is different in order to accommodate the unstressed syllables. Also, it can be seen that native speakers of English usually put stress on content words (words that carry information) and leave the function words (words that signify grammatical relationships) unstressed. These videos also helped me to understand rhythm in English better:
and
Then, I read the transcription of my archetype again, and put the stress patterns on it. Even though it took me sometime to finally finish putting of the stress patterns on my transcription, I found that it was easier for me to understand the nature of this rhythm because I already work on the word-level and sentence-level stresses. Here is my transcription:
The smallest dots show the unstressed syllables; the medium-sized dots show the stressed syllables, and the biggest dots show the sentence-level stress or the stressed words in sentences. When I tried to record myself for the first time after practicing this rhythm patterns, I found it more challenging since I was more aware of rhythm patterns, and I tried to be as precise as possible, but it turned out to be too exaggerating. Here is the result of my recording after several trials:
It is not perfect yet, but I am sure with more practice it will get better. For the next blog post, I will focus my practice on the prominence.
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.
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:
Pauses separate one thought group from another;
There is only one prominent element or word in each thought group;
Each thought group has its own intonation pattern; each utterance may have more than one thought group;
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.
