Prosodic features in phonetics

Prosodic features in phonetics

It is generally considered sufficient to transcribe three levels of stress on syllables: primary
(marked " ), secondary (marked Æ ) and unstressed (no mark). The use of these marks in
the example text should be taken to record the transcriber’s impression of the degree of
prominence heard. It has often been remarked that English stress is both FREE (in that any
syllable is capable in principle of receiving stress) and FIXED (since it only rarely happens
in a particular context that more than one stress placement is acceptable). Many attempts
have been made to produce rules for the placement of stress, either within the word or in
higher-level units, but such rules have frequent exceptions.
Many transcription systems for English intonation have been proposed, but no accepted
standard exists. There is general agreement that English speech may be divided into
intonational units of one or more syllables, each of which contains one major accent, and that
different pitch-accents or tones correspond to various attitudinal or syntactic functions, but it
is difficult to identify any intonational features that are unique to English, and the nature and
the number of pitch-patterns or pitch-accents is still a matter of dispute.
English RHYTHM is said to be STRESS-TIMED, i.e. the intervals between stressed syllables
tend to be constant and unstressed syllables are compressed to preserve the isochrony of the
inter-stress intervals. While the evidence for this is not completely conclusive, it is clear that
in RP there is a very marked difference between weak, unstressed syllables which in some
contexts may be almost undetectable and strong syllables (stressed or unstressed) which are
fully pronounced.