On suprasegmental features

一．Introduction

So far we have been talking about phonetic features as they apply to single phonetic segments, or phones. Phonetic features can also apply to a string of several sounds, such as a syllable, or an entire word or utterance. The study of phonological features which applies to groups larger than the single segment, are known as suprasegmental features, such as the syllable or the word. The study of these features is known as prosody. It mainly includes syllable, stress, pitch, tone, and intonation. In this paper, I will talk about the suprasegmental features in great detail.

Key words: phonetic, suprasegmental.

二．Syllable

The most obvious prosodic feature in language is the syllable. Let's briefly discuss the notion of syllables. Like all of our other basic linguistic concepts, although everyone knows what a syllable is, the concept "syllable" is difficult to define in absolute terms. A syllable can be divided into three parts, that is, onset, nucleus, and coda, of which nucleus is a must. A syllable that has no coda is called an open syllable while a syllable with coda is called a closed syllable. In English only long vowels and diphthongs can occur in open syllables. The onset may be empty or filled by a cluster of as many as three consonants, while the coda position may be filled as many as four consonants. The maximal onset principle states that when there is a choice as to where to place a consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda. In some languages, syllables are always open, that is, they always end in a vowel, never a consonant. (Hawaiian) On the other hand, every Hawaiian syllable must begin with a consonant. (Aloha spoken as a single word begins in a glottal stop.) In other languages, syllables are always closed; they must end in a consonant (Navaho): Háá'ishah dididiljah. Let's build a fire. Táá diné 'ooljéé'go naaskai' Three men went to the moon. (Like Hawaiian, they must also begin in a consonant.

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三．Stress

The nature of stress

The word stress is used differently by different authors, and the relationship between stress, emphasis, accent and prominence is also defined differently. Robins has defined it as “a generic term for the relatively greater force exerted in the articulation of part of utterance”. The nature of stress is simple enough—practically everyone would agree that the first syllable of words like“father”, “open” is stressed, that the middle syllable is stressed in “potato”, “apartment” and the final syllable is stressed in “about”, “perhaps”, and most people feel they have some sort of idea of what the difference is between stressed and unstressed syllables, though they might explain it in many different ways.

The production of stress is generally believed to depend on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used for unstressed syllables. From the perceptual point of view, all stressed syllables have one characteristic in common, and that is “prominence”. Roach has manifested that at least four different factors are important to make a syllable prominent:

i) Loudness: Most people seem to feel that stressed syllables are louder than unstressed ones; in other words, loudness is a component of prominence.

ii) Length: The length of syllables has an important part to play in prominence; the syllables which are made longer than the others will be heard as stressed.

iii) Pitch: Pitch in speech is closely related to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds and to the musical notion of low-pitched and high-pitched notes; if one syllable is said with a pitch that is noticeably different from that of the others, this will have a strong tendency to produce the effect of prominence.

iv) Quality: a syllable will tend to be prominent if it contains a vowel that is different in quality from neighboring vowels.

Languages differ in how they use stress.

1) In some languages, each syllable is equally stressed or unstressed,as in Cambodian

2) the syllable in each word is more stressed.

The place of stress is fixed on a certain syllable:

1) initial. Finnish, Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages

2) penultimate. Polish,

3) final. French.

4) Complex set of rules. In Bulgarian nouns and verbs have separate sets of rules for stress placement. Hopi (phonetic: first syllable of a two syllable word: síkwi meat; in words of three or more syllables, accent falls on the first long vowel: máamatsi to recognize; or on the first short vowel before a consonant cluster: péntani to write; otherwise it falls on the next to last syllable: wunúvtu stand up)

The place of stress is random.

1) In Russian the stress is completely random: xoroshó, xoróshi.

2) In English the stress is more predictable but still random. Usually a middle syllable of a longer word receives the stress. In two syllable words stress is rando and often renders differences in meaning: project/to project, produce/produce, and insult/ to insult.

Some languages have more than one stress per word: English is such a language. In English, words of four syllables or more have a primary and a secondary stress. Some English compounds have phrasal stress on the first element of the compound. Phrasal stress often distinguishes meaning in adjective/noun combinations.

Sentence stress in English

According to He Shanfen (1992), English sentence stress has two main functions:

⑴ to indicate the important words in the sentence; ⑵ to serve as the basis for the rhythmic structure of the sentence.

Consequently, in connected English speech, sentence stress usually falls on content ( or lexical) words, which carry the basic meaning of a sentence, e.g. nouns, adjectives, adverbs etc. Those which are usually unstressed in sentences are form (or structural) words, which show grammatical relationships, such as articles, auxiliary and modal verbs, monosyllabic prepositions, etc.