By the same Author LIVING ENGLISH STRUCTURE LIVING ENGLISH STRUCTURE FOR SCHOOLS LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH STRESS AND INTONATION PRACTICE FOR THE FOREIGN STUDENT By W.) LONGMANS WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT igned for use in its purpose being to present the Ề ry of the exercises is deliberately , Many of them being quite suitable for students who have been learning for less than six months. We are indebted to the Proprietors of Punch for per- This book is not a course in itself, but rather a graded mission to include Mum's the Word, by Marjorie Riddell, ise for providing practice in which appeared in the issue of March 4th, 1953. if the ability of any p of students seems As this book is intended for the use of all students of English, and not only students vii viii LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH specializing in the language, it has not been written in a honetic script. Exampl i in the normal BOOK LIST age student if he had to learn to Although a number of familiar intonation patterns in reada phonetic script fluently first.
The diacritics necessary English appears for the first time in this book as deliberate as a guide to the required stress or intonation have been practice material, the general background of this subject addec ing these with cer- has already been covered in many books and articles. On tain ossible to present these the writer of this book has based many of the exer- even complex patterns in the form of exercises that are cises, and students or teachers who are curious to make a readily understood. more detailed examination of this aspect of English should I must conclude these introductory remarks with sincere. consult the standard textbooks on the subject.
The follow- thanks to the many anonymous students who have un- ing books would probably be the most useful for an average wittingly contributed to the book whenever they opened general student: their mouths; to my wife for providing a lot of extra prac- tice material; and to Milica Rekalié of Belgrade for de- voting so many of her spare hours to making a typed draft from my original hieroglyphics, a feat only possible to one brought up on cursive cyrillics. ALLEN Belgrade April 1953 SUMMARY OF NOTATION AND TYPOGRAPHY x Examples: He will lcome to‘day. 'Can you lcome to,day? He ‘asked us to 'tell him the † tright way to ‘do it. SUMMARY OF NOTATION AND TYPOGRAPHY ‘The intonation of the model sentence at the beginning ‘The following list of signs and types is for reference only.
of each exercise is also shown graphically between two ‘More detailed explanation is given in the notes to the parallel lines. These lines represent the approximate upper appropriate exercises, and lower limits of the voice, with dashes to show stressed syllables, and dots to show unstressed ones. The three examples just used would be shown graphically as follows: (a) He will ‘come to*day. a Se RS ig Squares) anc (b) 'Can you !come to,day? Eg, take ít alway 600 a 7 w dw TRE Music notation is hết in addition where it is necessary (c) He lasked us to 'tell him thet Iright way to ‘do it.
= =- —N;: Syllables taking a stress in order to convey a special meaning, that is, in order to give them particular promi- nence in the speaker’s thoughts, are printed in CAPITALS. Intonation Example: But he wrote ‘YOUR name in ‘MY book, Introductory unstressed syllables are printed in italics. ‘The above sentence shown graphically: “The stressed syllable that begins a fall or a rise in the But he wrote YOUR name in ‘MY book. tune is printed in bold type.
‘The accent to indicate this fall is * 24g 2a TÂN aes. Sen “The accent to indicate this rise is , ‘A new high pitch in longer sentences is preedffbyÐE. This kind of stress, when occurring together with e x LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH rising *ntonation, produces the characteristic wave (fall- rise) that is found at the end of so many English sentences. It is printed here as follows:— Example: But I ‘CAN’T come toYDAY.
The above sentence shown graphically: INTRODUCTORY NOTES But I CAN'T come to“DAY. An English course for foreigners must necessarily con- ate Na AZ centrate on Tt cannot The division between two intonation patterns in one teach much about the spoken language apart from offering sentence is shown by a vertical stroke. Most of the practical work in Example: They were 'too ‘late | ,weren’t they? spoken English must be normally he uses either more or less spoken English in his classes in ‘The above sentence shown graphically:. This book They were \too ‘ate, ,weren’t they? is designed to give systematic practice in the spoken lan- guage.
It assumes a basic knowledge of the sounds of ty | English and provides graded exercises in the less easily However accur- ately we learn to pronounce the isolated sounds ofa language we nust still train ourselves to set them in motionin the right manner if we wish to make ourselves easily under- stood. A student of music learns the[ĐEirToEEUETDiSiNm] 36ddlg into harfoBie sequences, yet he does not create music until he can make this a melodic Shape. Music has its e regular of 8 = it has its ow: ¡ andnelody le poken language 4 al a broadly similar cay ‘The in music, o1 y This movement xiv LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH INTRODUCTORY NOTES. is thejthemelthat this book develops throughout its series practised from all three sections simultaneousiy.
The of controlled exercises. vocabulary is simple and (ipsto-date; and, except for the Broadly speaking, a FêäSOñAblÿ Eorreêt speéch-flow ïs exercises on the secondafy stress of longiwords, it is well more important for intelligibility than corfect sounds, It hin the range of fairly elementary students, is possible to carry on an intelligible English conversation ‘The book is not intended to be “Worked through?” in the in a series of mumbles and grunts, provided the voice- manner of afi Ordinary text-book, An exercise or two should movement is correct. English people often do this when be used at every opportunity for oral practice as part of exchanging a few words on aitrivial topic, though we do not the classwork in spoken English. An important feature ofa suggest that foreign students should take examples of this large number of the exercises, especially those on stress kind of intercourse as their models) On the other band, and Fhythmi, is repetition.
Phrases or patterns are to be some foreign speakers of English, even though they learn repeated twoloF three times, and the teacher must insist to make English sounds quite well, fail to acquire aysuffi- on wnhurried regularity, taking care to start Off the next ciently accurate specch-flow. ‘The result is that Englishe phrase himself at the samelfegular pace. This kind of speaking people find it quite difficult to understand them; exercise can be Képt steady more easily by practisinga and they, for their part, complain that English people mis- group of people rather than individual students. The pronounce or swallow half their words, tapping of a ruler or pencil, or hand movement as for the ‘This book consists of exercises on all the aspects of restrained conducting of a choir, will certainly be needed spoken English that contain problems for 2 foreign student.
from time to time. ‘There are, however, no drills omindividualsounds, Most If any real progress is to be made towards a type of class text-books on modern lines contain sufficient practice spoken English that sounds natural, faulty speeeh-Hlow material on the sounds themselves. Here you will find should be corrected at every opportunity; an exercise in material to practise typical English speech patterns. Al- grammar done orally should at the same time be treated though it is wiser not to make a rigid division between the as an exercise in the spoken Janguage.
It is important to elements of Stress, Rhythm and Intonation, this book docs start pood habits right from the very first lessons, for five in fact present its exercises to the student in that order. The earlier exercises are purely on the stressing of Words minutes’ drill in the early stages is worth fifty minutes at a in phrases and sentences; this leads to speech rhythms, later stage when bad habits have already been allowed to with exercises on typical English rhythmic patterns; and form. Itis not necessary to spend too much time on trying the final (and longest) section of the bookjdeals with intona- to perfect the pronunciation of elementary students, but tion, presupposing some knowledge of stressjandyrhythm. they should be made to imitate the broader features of the Nevertheless, teachers will find that exercises can be spoken language whenever they use it, By spending too much time on the sounds of English in the early stages of '-The graded pronunciation drills that run through the first three books of the well-known Essential English method, by C.
Eckersley (Long- 2 Oxford Progressive Enalih for Adult Learners, by A. Hornby, ‘mans, Green), provide an excellent example of this, published by Oxford University Press, 2953, has work on stress and ine onation us an integral part of the early stayes of learning. xvi LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH learning the Janguage STRESS AND RHYTHM When English is spoken, we can hear that some ayllables stand out above the others. This can be quite an objective feature of speech, since it is just as marked when reading a list of words from a dictionary like the natural str in an objective B usually affects the For this reason exercises on it are delayed until the appropriate place jong exercises on intonal pecan ee er stressing of individual words of several syllables will be found as a1 i: exercises ference between syllables in the matter of stress.
Native speakers of such languages find it especially difficult to achieve a natural speech-fow in English; they would be advised, therefore, to do the stress and rhythm exercises carefully and to return to them from time to time, “eg. French, 1 + LIVING ENGLISH SPEECH STRESS AND RHYTHM For the sake of the exercises that comprise the greater part of this book, work on stress and rhythm has been modated between them in somewhat artificially separated from that on intonation. The latter provide one of the greatest difficulties for the It is stress, however, that largely dictates the significant foreign student, who generally tries to give them a fuller moves of the voice up or down, and an ability to stress a pronunciation than is due to them. phrase correctly will help to guide the speaker to use the We can see this most clearly by compari correct intonation, for the voice changes its direction only on stressed syllables.
Stress and rhythm are even more erefore closely connected; we might draw a useful musical parallel of few stresses). Consider the following four sentene. by likening stress to the main beats or pulse, and rhythm the first and second have 11 and 12 words respectively, 10 to the various patterns of movement that fill the spaces from of them being stressed; the third and fourth have 14 one pulse to another. One cannot rely too much on this ectively with only 4 stresses each.
Yet musical analogy, however, since the pulse and rhythm of conversational speech or of prose-reading will be of a much freer pattern than the more regularly recurring musical bars. Nevertheless, for the sake of practice, many of the exercises that follow should be done under a kind of musical discipline with an insistence on rhythmic regularity. 'Bert’s Ifriend 'John has ‘just 'sold !two 'very lñne lold ‘paintings. The IDaniel "Jones Prolnouncing ‘Dictionary lists It can be generally assumed that in any normal sentence Imost versions of Imodern 'English pronunci‘ation.
we shall stress (or give full sound value to) the significant .