Chapter 8: Suprasegmental Phonology: Stress, Rhythm, Intonation

8.1. Stess and prominence. The phonemic (contrastive) function of stress

8.2. Free stress and fixed stress. The predictability of accentual patterns
8.3. Metric patterns
8.4. Morphological processes and stress shift
8.5. Primary and secondary stress
8.6. Weak and strong forms. Vowel reduction and delition
8.7. Rhythm
8.8. Intonational contours. Their pragmatic value

CHAPTER 8

SUPRASEGMENTALS: STRESS,
RHYTHM, INTONATION

8.1 Stess and prominence. The phonemic (contrative) function of

stress

In the preceding chapter we conducted our analysis beyond the limit of

phonological units and described syllables as sequences of sounds establishing a
collocation relationship between the elements they were made up of. With this we went
beyond the limit of mere segments and entered the domain of suprasegmental phonology.
By assuming syllables to be hierarchical structures, combinations of sounds in which
some elements (the nucleus) were more important than others, we departed from the
strictly linear representation of phonological combinations and adopted a non-linear
approach.
The last chapter of this study is concerned with such notions as stress, rhythm and
intonation. As we are soon going to see – a fact that is obvious even intuitively – such
phonological realities are relevant at a level of a higher complexity than that of the mere
segment and are considered to be typical suprasegmentals. Another term used to refer to
them is prosodic elements. Prosody is a word coming from Greek and referring roughly
to the musicality of phonetic sequences. Etymology is relevant in this case since, as we
are going to see, we will be able to draw numerous parallels between tonality in human
speech and tonality in music. Such prosodic elements are often called metrical elements
and we can speak of metrical phonology analyzing such suprasegmental phenomena. A
parallel is drawn here with poetry where the metre is an essential element when we
discuss the prosodic structure of verse. The scope of this book will again not allow us to
go into very many details, but some elementary information in this field is essential for
anyone wishing to have even a very general image of the sound structures of English.
It would be difficult maybe even for a specialist to give a very accurate definition
of stress, but even a schoolchild will be intuitively aware that when we talk about stress
in a word or in more complex structures we talk in fact about prominence, or emphasis,
that is parts of that word or structures are perceived as having a higher degree of
prominence in comparison to the others. Thus, if asked where the accent or stress falls in
a word like, say, tunic [tjunik], an English pupil will unhesitatingly answer “on the first
syllable”, while if asked the same question about the corresponding word in French,
tunique [tynik] a French schoolchild will say: “on the second syllable”. If we carefully
examine the two words we will see, indeed, that besides a minor difference in the vocalic
sequence of the first syllable – a semivowel and a back, high, unrounded vowel in
English and the corresponding front, high, rounded vowel in French, the main difference
between the two words lies in the placement of stress. The answers of the two children
will be also relevant for the suprasegmental nature of stress, since they would perceive
accent as a phenomenon affecting syllables, not mere sounds. A suggestive representation
of the different accentual pattern of the two words, could be the following, where the
emboldened letters represent the more prominent sequence of sounds: tunic; tunique (the
last two letters of the French word don’t have any phonetic materialization).
Though not easy to define, this prominence we are talking about has certain
acoustic correlates. A stressed syllable will be heard louder, and therefore be
characterized by a higher intensity or amplitude, will have a longer duration, will display
a change in pitch or frequency.
The example above contrasted stress placement in two different languages. If we
try to do the same thing within the same linguistic system we will notice some interesting
facts. Compare, for instance, the two possible pronunciations – due to the difference in
stress placement of the Romanian verb urcă ”climb”. If we place the stress on the first
syllable and read it urcă, we interpret it as the third person singular indicative present
form; if, however, we place the stress on the second syllable, and read it urcă, we have
the third person singular of the indicative simple perfect form. A pretty similar example
would be fentă/fentă, the reading with the stress on the first syllable interpreting the
sequence as a noun (“feint”, “dodge”) while the reading with the stress on the last
syllable interprets it as the third person singular simple perfect of the corresponding verb
(“he feinted” “he dodged”). The obvious conclusion is that stress has contrastive,
phonemic value as segments like p and b had in our analysis in the fifth chapter, and that
we can consider it, in certain situations, a suprasegmental phoneme. Our enthusiasm will
be soon tempered by the observation that these are rare cases in Romanian, a language
where stress seldom performs such a function. If we turn to English, however, plenty of
examples will come up, underlying the decisive role played by the stress in distinguishing
members of verb/noun pairs, formed by the extremely productive – in English – process
of conversion; e.g. increase (v) / increase (n); implant (v) / implant (n); dispute (v);
dispute (n); contrast (v); contrast (n).