Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

Suprasegmentals

So far in this section, we have examined segments, that is individual

sounds and their pronunciations. However, pronunciation involves far more than just stringing together individual sounds. We shall now examine the level of organisation that exists above the level of the segment, the suprasegmental level.

All words can be divided into one or more syllables. Although most of us can easily recognise syllables (including small children, see section 6), it is rather difficult to give a strict definition of the term. One way of determining the number of syllables in a word is to try singing it; each syllable is sung on a separate note (though not necessarily on a different pitch, of course). We shall be considering the structure of syllables in detail in section 5; here we will just consider their basic shape.

A syllable typically contains a consonant or set of consonants followed by a vowel followed by another consonant or set of consonants, e.g. cat [kæt] or

springs [spɹɪŋz]. A string of more than one consonant such as [spr] or [ŋz] is called a cluster (or, more precisely, a consonant cluster). However, either set of consonants may be missing from a syllable as, for example, in spray [spɹeɪ] (no final consonant), imps [ɪmps] (no initial consonants) or eye [aɪ] (no consonants at all). Words with one syllable (springs, cat) are monosyllabic, while words with more than one syllable are polysyllabic. From this, we might conclude that the only obligatory part of a syllable is the vowel, but this is not quite correct. What a syllable must have is a nucleus or peak, and characteristically this is a vowel.

However, in restricted cases, it is possible for the nucleus of a syllable to be a consonant. For instance, the word table is disyllabic (has two syllables), containing the syllables [teɪ] and [bl̩]. There is no vowel in the second syllable, and its nucleus is the consonant [l̩], a syllabic consonant. In transcription we represent a syllabic consonant by a mark placed beneath it. In English [m n] can also be syllabic, as in bottom [bɒtm̩] and button [bʌtn̩]. It is sometimes useful to mark the division between syllables in transcription. This is done by placing a dot between syllables, e.g. polysyllabic [pɒ.lɪ.sɪ.la.bɪk].

Next, we consider the devices involving changes in loudness or the pitch of

sounds that languages use to convey meaning. These are stress, tone and intonation, which collectively are called prosodic phenomena. We begin with stress.

If we compare the words transport in means of transport and to transport

goods, we can hear an important difference in pronunciation. In means of transport the first syllable, tran-, gets greater emphasis than the second, -sport, while in to transport goods it’s the second syllable which gets the greater emphasis. This emphasis is called stress, and we say that in means of TRANsport the first syllable

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sounds

bears stress, while in to tranSPORT the second syllable is stressed. The other syllable remains unstressed. Physically, a stressed syllable tends to be louder and often a little longer than an unstressed one. In the official IPA system, stress is indicated by means of the sign ˈ placed before the stressed syllable: [ˈtranspɔːt]

TRANsport (noun) v. [tranˈspɔːt] tranSPORT (verb). However, many linguists

prefer to indicate main stress by means of an acute accent over the stressed vowel:

[tránspɔːt] (noun) v. [transpːt] (verb).

Some syllables have a degree of stress intermediate between full stress and no stress. Consider the word photographic. The main stress falls on the third syllable in [fou.tə.gra.fɪk]. The second and fourth syllables are unstressed. However, the first syllable has some stress, though not as much as the third. This is called secondary stress. In IPA it is transcribed with the mark ˌ : [ˌfoutəˈgrafɪk]. An alternative is to indicate secondary stress by a grave accent placed over the vowel:

[fòutəgráfɪk].

The type of stress which distinguishes words such as [´transpɔːt] from [trans´pɔːt]

is known as lexical stress or word stress. There is another type of stress in which certain words within phrases are given more emphasis than others. Consider (23):

(23)

Tom builds houses

In a neutral pronunciation, each word receives an even amount of emphasis,

though slightly more falls on the stressed syllable of houses: Tom builds

HOUSes. This is a natural answer to a question such as ‘What does Tom do?’ or

‘What does Tom build?’ However, if we put more emphasis on builds to get Tom BUILDS houses, then this can only be a natural answer to a question like ‘What does Tom do with houses?’, or more likely a correction to someone who thinks that Tom repairs houses or sells them. Finally, in TOM builds houses we have a reply to the question ‘Who builds houses?’ This type of stress is often called phrasal stress. (Many linguists also refer to it as accent, though this mustn’t be confused with the term ‘accent’ meaning the particular type of pronunciation associated with a given dialect.) It can often be important in disambiguating sentences which are ambiguous in the purely written form.

Turning to our second prosodic phenomenon, the pitch of the voice is very

important in language, and all languages make use of it for some purpose. In some languages different words are distinguished from each other by means of pitch.

Here are some more Yoruba words:

(24)

high tone

mid tone

low tone

tí

‘that, which’

ti

‘property of’

tì

‘to push’

ʃé

‘isn’t it? etc.’

ʃe

‘to do’

ʃè

‘to offend’

ɔk

‘hoe’

ɔkɔ

‘husband’

ɔk

‘canoe’

The word tí with the mark óver the vowel is pronounced at a higher pitch than the word ti, which in turn is pronounced at a higher pitch than tì. These different pitches are called tones. We say that tí has high tone, ti has mid tone and tì has low tone. Notice that one of the systems for transcribing stress uses the same

Sounds and suprasegmentals

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symbols for primary and secondary stress as are used here for high and low tone.

In most cases, this doesn’t cause any confusion, though languages do exist which have both independent tone and independent stress. In such cases, we can use the IPA symbols for stress and use the grave and acute accents for tone.

Some languages distinguish only two levels of tone, while others distinguish up to four levels. When a language distinguishes words from each other using pitch in this way we say that it has lexical tone.

The words stvari ‘things’ and stvari ‘(in) a thing’ in Serbian-Croatian are

distinguished by tone, though in a different way from the Yoruba examples we have just described. In the word meaning ‘things’ the pitch falls from high to low during the course of the vowel [a], while in the word meaning ‘(in) a thing’ the pitch rises from low to high on that vowel. Tones of this sort, where the pitch changes during the course of the syllable are called contour tones, as opposed to the tones of Yoruba, which are called level tones. In some languages, we get more complex contour tones in which the tone first rises then falls or vice versa. The classic example is Mandarin Chinese. In (25) we see four words which are distinguished solely by their tones, with the broken lines indicating pitch and the unbroken lines being reference pitches (the words appear in the standard Pinyin transcription, the official romanisation of the language in the People’s Republic of China, and correspond to IPA [ji]):

(25)

word

meaning

tone

y¯