Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

partly phonemically in words, and partly as a feature of
longer phrases or sentences. Depending on the degree of
stress, and the prominence thereby given to one syllable
rather than another, the following can be different words:
concert, project, desert, and many others. But the phonemic
feature which separates deserts (merits) from deserts
(wildernesses), is not just a simple matter of emphasising the
first syllable or the second. An equally important part of the
stress system here involves the way the vowel in the
unstressed syllable is pronounced. In the first case, the first
syllable of deserts is unstressed and the vowel is weakened to
the short /i/. The neutral vowel (ə) is found in the second
syllable of deserts in the second case.
Stress is a feature of words not only when the word
contrasts phonemically with its minimal pair partner, but
also in giving shape to a word as spoken. English does not
have as rigid a system of stress patterning as some other
languages, where, for example, the stress may fall always
on the first syllable (Czech), or on the penultimate syllable
(Polish), or on the last syllable (Persian). But there is still a
fixed stress pattern for any particular word. Learning this is
simply a matter of experience. There are only a few
generalisations to be made, for example stress regularly
falls on the first syllable of the suffix ‘-otion’, and the suffix
‘ity’ is always preceded by a stressed syllable. On the whole,
learners simply have to get used to the sound shape of a
word with its stresses. It is vital that they do so, since they
may be virtually unintelligible if they use the wrong stress
patterns.
As a feature of phrases and sentences, stress determines
the rhythm of English, which is therefore said to be stress-
timed. English speakers tend to make the stressed syllables of
their utterances come at roughly equal intervals of time, so
that all the following sentences would take about the same
time to say because they have the same number of stresses
(irrespective of the number of syllables):
‘I bought a dog.’
‘It’s a dog I bought.’
‘But it’s a dog that I bought.’

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Pronunciation
54
The unstressed syllables in longer utterances tend to be
rushed and slurred so that the total time taken remains the
same as long as the number of stressed syllables is the same.
In many other languages, Chinese for example, each syllable
is given equal time. Such a syllable-timed pronunciation of
English gives a machine-gun impression, but is not difficult
to understand. The problem for speakers of syllable-timed
languages learning English is to understand English speech,
in particular to catch the words in unstressed position which
are spoken very quickly. For it is not merely a matter of
speaking these words fast, but very often of changing their
pronunciation as well.
The most frequently observed pronunciation change is
that of the weakened vowel, which usually becomes the
neutral vowel in most pronouns, articles, conjunction and
preposition. Words like but and a have a strong form and a
weak form /b
∧t/, bət/, and /ei/, /ə/. Consonants are also
affected. For example the consonant of ‘is’ changes from /z/
to /s/ when the /i/ is dropped in unstressed position after a
voiceless consonant, as in ‘What’s the time?’.
Stress thus functions at two levels. Within a word, one or
more syllables have heavier stress than the others. At phrase
and sentence level, one or more words are stressed more
heavily than the others. The speaker has no choice of which
syllable to stress in a word, but at phrase or sentence level he
stresses words to suit his meaning. In ‘I expect you to bring
John’ the speaker implies that John is to be expected rather
than whoever else could be brought. But in ‘I expect you to
bring John’, he implies that someone else does not expect
John. Stress is thus relative. Within the word ‘expect’, the
second syllable is stressed more heavily than the first. But in
relation to the whole sentence, the words ‘John’ or ‘I’ are
stressed more heavily than ‘expect’ and all the other words.
Stress, at phrase and sentence level, is closely tied with
intonation, since the pitch of the voice moves either up or
down on the word which is most heavily stressed. Thus, even
if a foreign speaker places his stress correctly, he cannot
convey his meaning effectively unless he also uses
appropriate intonation.
The function of intonation in English is basically very
different from its role in tone languages like Chinese or

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Pronunciation
55
Luganda, where it is phonemic in distinguishing words from
each other just as consonants and vowels do. Thus, two
words in these languages may have the same vowels and
consonants, but be different words because of a fixed
difference in pitch level. In English, tone (or pitch) is not
phonemic in this way. On the whole English intonation
conveys attitudinal or emotional meaning and is very closely
tied to the context of an utterance. Thus ‘Please open the
window’ can sound pleading or peremptory, depending on
the intonation used.
(a)
(b)
If the request follows the question ‘What shall I open?’, how-
ever, the heaviest stress, and therefore the main pitch move-
ment, must occur on ‘window’. In this case (a), the pleading
intonation pattern, would change to
(c)
and (b) would change to
(d)
Since it is often naively supposed that there are universal
ways of indicating attitude and emotion, the teaching of
English intonation is very often neglected. It is, in fact, so
important in spoken communication that many would prefer
to give it priority over articulation of segmental sounds in
pronunciation teaching.