Aspects of connected speech

Aspects of connected speech

1. Phonology is about the relationship between sounds when they are forced into a relationship with each other.

   • Assimilation.
     • A phoneme is realised differently as a result of being near to some other phoneme. Generally consonants are assimilated.
   • Ellison.
     • "Under certain circumstances sounds disspear. One might express this in more technical language by saying that in certain circumstances a phoneme may be realised as zero, or have zero realisation. (Roach, 1993).
       • Examples: Scripts: "t". Tonight : "tnait".
     • In rapid speech.
   • Linking.
     • Since without some ability to reproduce it, speech becomes much too mechanical.
       • Linking "r" is the easiest example of this.
         • Some name this also as: Juncture.
   • Rhythm.
     • A phenomenon that carries over into the issue of STRESS. (stress timing).
       • The theory states that English is much more rhythmical than most langauges.
         • Pike (1943) thought that the differences between syllable and stress- timed language are much less signiicant than is thought.
   • Stress.
     • When we talk about strees we are reffering to "accent", as it is often called, at both sentence and word level.
       • People tend to strees information (lexical) words before functional, grammatical words.
       • People tend to strees new information or information that the speaker assumes his or her interlocutor doesn´t know about.
       • Importance of intonation to interpretate.
         • Stressed syllables seem to be louder than the syllables they surround. Thay seem to be longer too.
           • A syllable will be prominent of it is different in quality from its neighbouring vowels.
     • Stress in words.
       • Can one make sense of word stress form a teaching point of view?
         • Categories: Syntactic. Stress on a word depends partly on what part of speech it is. Morphological. Suffixies such as "tion" and "ity" have a role in the location of stress. (Compound words and complext words). Phonological. Can seem the most complex. In many cases on the nature of the final two syllables of a word, often called the "penult" and the "ult".
       • English stress rules.
         • English is left- baised and "al" is suffix, and affixies are very rarely stressed in English.
           • Stress also follows consonant clusters. Two or more consecutive consonants in a syllable seem to be another factor for attraction.