Section 5 english rhythm

This is what English phoneticians say about rhythm in speech:

“ It occasionally happens that a foreign student acquires good pronunciation and even correct intonation, and one wonders what it is that betrays his non-English origin. It is his faulty rhythm”.

“ Examples of Shakespeare’s prose show that, while the English language may have changed to a certain extent in form, pronunciation and idiom, its speech rhythm has remained unaltered for about four hundred years”.

“Rhythm and intonation –two features of pronunciation upon which intelligibility largely rests. The surest way to become unintelligible in language is to distort its natural rhythm.”

Every language has its own characteristic rhythm. To an English-speaking person the rhythm of other languages (particularly Japanese, Spanish, Italian) sounds mechanically regular – a series of little bursts of sound all of about the same size and force, like a machine-gun fire. English pronounced with such a rhythm would probably not be understood. If asked to draw a picture representing the rhythm of the syllables in Spanish, the speaker of English might produce a line of soldiers of very much the same size and following one another at rather regular intervals. English rhythm can be pictured as a series of families, each composed of an adult accompanied by several small children of varying sizes. A few of the adults might be childless.

So, rhythm is a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Every sentence is divided into rhythmical groups. There are as many rhythmical groups in a sentence as there are stressed syllables. The sentence may consist of one rhythmical group or more: 'Yes. (one group) 'Don’t 'go 'there! (three groups). But most rhythmical groups consist of one stressed syllable and several unstressed ones which have tendency to cling to the preceding stressed syllable, so we call them enclitics. When the unstressed syllables cling to the following stressed syllable, they are proclitics. Rhythmic group covers one stressed syllable and several unstressed ones until the consequent stressed syllable.

Look at the following sentences: e.g. 'Wait for me. (one rhythm. group) They are 'very 'happy (two rhythm. groups). It 'isn’t e'xactly what I 'want. (_three rhythm. groups)

As a rule in English proclitics are pronounced more quickly than enclitics, but the enclitics are more frequent than proclitics.

Rhythm is closely connected with stress and it has great influence upon sentence and word stress. In the words with two primary stresses one of the stresses may be omitted under the influence of stress: e.g. There are 'fourteen 'boys. He’s 'just four'teen.

Notional word are also lose their stress under the influence of rhythm: e.g. I 'don’t want to 'go. 'Let’s take a 'taxi.

Remember! Sometimes due to the fact that rhythm is considered as periodical alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables and there are more enclitics than proclitics in English, it is sometimes easy to cause unintelligibility. To avoid this we must not allow to break the semantic relations between stressed and unstressed syllables. Look at the following examples:

1. He was 'laughed at 'everywhere.

2. He was 'laughing at 'everything.

Both sentences consist of two rhythmic groups. In the first example the enclitic at is semantically close to the verb laughed. But in the second example the enclitic at is semantically close to everything. So , to make this sentence sound correctly, without breaking semantic relations, we must make at a proclitic: He was 'laughing at 'everything. Now you see that in the above example the rhythmical division was wrong.

Basic rules of English rhythm that a learner may find useful are as follows:

1. Keep more or less regular intervals between stressed and unstressed syllables.

2. The greater the number of unstressed syllables in the sentence, the more rapidly they are pronounced.

3. Initial unstressed syllables (proclitics) are pronounced more rapidly than those inside the sentence (enclitics).

4. Do not break semantic relations between stressed and unstressed syllables. If enclitic is semantically closer to the following syllable, it is pronounced as proclitic.