Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Pronunciation and grammar
There are a number of important links between English
grammar and both segmental and supra-segmental features
of pronunciation. The traditionally labelled 5 plural, for
example, has a different pronunciation according to which
sound it follows, as does the ed past tense ending. Thus the
final sounds of all the following words are different: ships,
shoes, roses, laughed, loved, hated. In the sentences There he
is’ and ‘There’s a man outside’, the different stressing and
vowel sounds in the first word signal that in the former

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Pronunciation
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sentence there is an adverb, while in the latter it is an empty
slot-filler, the ‘existential there’.
At the supra-segmental level, stress and intonation show
distinctions like that between ‘My husband who lives in New
York is a banker’ and ‘My husband, who lives in New York,
is a banker’—in this case matched by a punctuation
difference. In sentences like ‘He didn’t go to London because
he was ill’ only intonation, which cannot be shown by
punctuation, distinguishes the two possible meanings (cf. the
problem on p. 18).