Me. introduce

So far, we have been talking about the phonetic features applied to a single speech segment or phoneme. Phonetic features can also be applied to a string of several sounds, such as a syllable, or an entire word or utterance. The study of phonological features suitable for more than a single segment is called suprasegmental features, such as syllables or words. The study of these features is called prosody. It mainly includes syllables, stress, pitch, tone and intonation. In this article, I will discuss the characteristics of suprasegmental in detail.

Key words: voice, suprasegmental.

Two. syllable

The most obvious prosodic feature in language is syllable. Let's briefly discuss the concept of syllables. Like all our other basic linguistic concepts, although everyone knows what a syllable is, it is difficult to define the concept of "syllable" in absolute terms. A syllable can be divided into three parts, namely initial, final and final, in which the final is necessary. A syllable without an ending is called an open syllable and a syllable with an ending is called a closed syllable. In English, only long vowels and diphthongs can appear in open syllables. The initial may be empty, or it may be filled with a string of consonants consisting of up to three consonants, while the vowel position may be filled with up to four consonants. The principle of maximum initial sound points out that when the position of consonant can be selected, it will be placed in the initial sound rather than the final sound. In some languages, syllables are always open, that is, they always end with vowels, not consonants. (Hawaiian) On the other hand, every Hawaiian syllable must begin with a consonant. Aloha is pronounced as a word, starting with a guttural sound. In other languages, syllables are always closed; They must end with a consonant (Navajo): Há' ishah didididljah. Let's make a fire. Three people went to the moon. Like Hawaiian, they must start with a consonant.

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Three. emphasize

The essence of stress

Different writers use the word stress differently, and the relationship between stress, emphasis, stress and prominence also has different definitions. Robbins defines it as "a general term for relatively large forces exerted in the pronunciation of a part of speech". The essence of stress is very simple-almost everyone will agree that the first syllable of words like "father" and "open" is stressed, the middle syllable is stressed in "potato" and "apartment", and the last syllable is stressed in "about" and "maybe". Most people think that they have some ideas about the difference between stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, although they may take it as an example.

It is generally believed that the generation of stress depends on the speaker using more muscle energy than unstressed syllables. From the perspective of perception, all stressed syllables have a common feature, that is, "prominence". Roach has proved that at least four different factors are important to highlight a syllable:

I) Loudness: Most people seem to think that stressed syllables are bigger than unstressed syllables; In other words, loudness is a component of prominence.

Ii) Length: The length of syllables plays an important role in prominence; Syllables that are longer than other syllables will be considered stressed syllables.

Pitch: the pitch in speech is closely related to the vibration frequency of vocal cords and the musical concepts of bass and treble; If the pitch of one syllable is obviously different from that of other syllables, it will easily produce outstanding effects.

Iv) Quality: If a syllable contains a vowel with a quality different from that of an adjacent vowel, the syllable will tend to stand out.

Different languages use stress in different ways.

1) In some languages, each syllable is stressed or unstressed the same, such as Cambodian.

2) The syllables in each word are more stressed.

The position of stress is fixed on a syllable:

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

2) penultimate. Poles,

3) finally. French.

4) Complex rule set. In Bulgarian, nouns and verbs have different stress rules. Hopi (pronunciation: the first syllable of a disyllabic word: síkwi meat；; In words with three or more syllables, the stress falls on the first long vowel: máamatsi； to be recognized; Or on the first short vowel before the consonant cluster: péntani; Otherwise it falls on the penultimate syllable: wunúvtu stands up)

The place of stress is random.

1) The stress in Russian is completely random: xoroshó, xoróshi.

2) In English, stress is easier to predict, but it is still random. Usually the middle syllable of longer words is stressed. In two-syllable words, stress is random and often shows different meanings: projection/projection, generation/generation and insult/insult.

Some languages have more than one stress per word: English is such a language. In English, words with four or more syllables have primary stress and secondary stress. The first component of some English compound words is stressed. Phrase stress often distinguishes meaning in adjective/noun combinations.

Sentence Stress in English

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

(1) point out the important words in the sentence; ⑵ As the basis of sentence rhythm structure.

Therefore, in English conjunctions, sentence stress usually falls on the substantive words (or vocabulary) that express the basic meaning of sentences, such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on. What is usually unstressed in a sentence are formal (or structural) words that express grammatical relations, such as articles, auxiliary verbs and modal verbs, monosyllabic prepositions, etc.