Боргуль Н. М. Пособие по основам теории изучаемого языка, печать
жүктеу/скачать 0,78 Mb. Pdf көрінісі
|
Оқытылатын тіл
- Бұл бет үшін навигация:
- UNIT 6. WORD STRESS
| The constitutive function
. It lies in the ability to be a part of a word or word itself. The syllable forms language units of greater magnitude, that is words, morphemes and utterances. 2. The distinctive function. In this respect the syllable is characterized by its ability to differentiate words and word-forms. To illustrate this a set of minimal pairs should be found so that qualitative and quantitative peculiarities of certain allophones should indicate the beginning or the end of the syllable. The distinction between word combination can be illustrated by many examples: An aim - a name Mice kill - my skill An ice house - a nice house Peace talks - pea stalks Plate rack - play track UNIT 6. WORD STRESS A word, as a meaningful language unit, has a definite phonetic structure. The phonetic structure of a word comprises not only the sounds that the word is composed of and not only the syllabic structure that these sounds form, it also has a definite stress pattern. The auditory impression of stress is that of prominence. And if a word contains more than one syllable, the relative prominence of those syllables differs. There may be one prominent syllable in a word as compared to the rest of the syllables of the same word (as in "important"); there may be two equally prominent syllables (as in "examination") or more prominent syllables (as in "unreliability"). And this correlation of degrees of prominence of the syllables in a word forms the stress pattern of the word, which is often called the accentual structure of a word. The stress patterns of different words may coincide. Thus the words "mother", "table", "happy", "after" have an identical stress pattern, though their sound structures have nothing in common. The stress pattern of these words differs from that of "analyze", "prominent", "syllable", "character" . Monosyllabic words have no stress pattern, because there can be established no correlation of prominence within it. Yet as lexical units monosyllables are regarded as stressed. The stress patterns of words are generally perceived without difficulty. People easily distinguish between " 'subject " and " sub'ject ". 47 Actual speech does not consist of isolated words. And the stress pattern of a word is deduced from how the word is accented in connected speech. On the other hand, the stress pattern of a word is only its potential pattern in an utterance. Though English words generally retain their stress patterns in connected speech, there occur numerous instances when the stress pattern of a word is altered. Cf. 'unhappy - He was 'so un'happy. - He 'remembered those 'unhappy 'days. Word stress should not be confused with utterance stress. Word stress belongs to the word when said in isolation, utterance stress belongs to the utterance. The placement of utterance stress is primarily conditioned by the situational and linguistic context. It is also conditioned by subjective factors: by the speaker's intention to bring out words, which are considered by him to be semantically important in the situational context. As for the stress pattern of a word, it is conditioned only by objective factors: pronunciation tendencies and the orthoepic norm. One cannot distort the stress pattern of a word on one's own, because such a distortion will make speech unintelligible. As stated above, the auditory impression of stress is that of prominence. So a stressed syllable on the auditory level is a syllable that has special prominence. The effect of prominence may be produced by a greater degree of loudness, greater length of the stressed syllable, some modifications in its pitch and quality. Acoustic analysis shows that the perception of prominence may be due to definite variations of the following acoustic parameters: intensity, duration, frequency, formant structure. All these parameters generally interact to produce the effect of prominence. In different languages stress may be achieved by various combinations of these parameters. Depending upon which parameter is the principal one in producing the effect of stress, word stress in languages may be of different types. There are languages with dynamic word stress. Stress in such languages is achieved by a greater force of articulation, which results in greater loudness, on the auditory level, and the greater intensity on the acoustic level. The stressed syllables are louder than the unstressed ones. All the other parameters play a less important role in producing the effect of stress in such languages. In languages with musical word stress prominence is mainly achieved by variations in pitch level, the main acoustic parameter being fundamental frequency. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese are languages with musical word stress (or tonic word stress). The meaning of the words in those languages depends on the pitch levels of their syllables. Swedish word stress is characterized as dynamic and musical, because both loudness and pitch variations are relevant factors in producing prominence. For instance, the Swedish word "Anden" with falls in pitch on both syllables means "soul", but when pronounced with a fall in pitch on the first syllable and low pitch on the second syllable means "duck". In languages with quantitative word stress the effect of stress is mainly based on the quantity of the sound, i.e. its duration. In such languages vowels in the stressed syllables are always longer than vowels in unstressed syllables. Russian word stress is 48 considered to be mainly quantitative though it has been proved that duration is not the only parameter that produces the effect of stress in Russian. Until recently, English word stress was considered to be dynamic, as stress was generally correlated with loudness. But numerous investigations of the acoustic nature of English word stress have made it clear that stress in English does not depend on intensity alone, and that English word stress is of a complex nature. Thus, relative prominence in the listener's mind is created by an interaction of four acoustic parameters: intensity, fundamental frequency, duration and formant structure. The peculiarity of this interaction still remains a controversial problem and a very complicated one. Therefore stress in English manifests itself in various ways, either the intensity, or duration of the stressed syllable may increase, or the spectrum of the stressed vowel may be sharpened, or the fundamental frequency may show a distinct rise (or fall). There may also be a combination of any of these parameters. As for Russian word stress, it is considered to be quantitative (because in Russian a stressed syllable is about 1.5 times longer than an unstressed syllable) and, secondarily, it is qualitative and dynamic. жүктеу/скачать 0,78 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
|