Practice Material For English Phonetics 1: Basic Prosody .

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Practice material for English Phonetics 1:Basic prosody and connected speechŠtefan Beňuš

Contents1.Introduction . 31.1.Motivation. 41.2.Material . 51.3.Notes on the approach taken in the book . 72.Crash course to basic suprasegmental aspects of fluent speech . 112.1.Weak forms . 112.2.Connected speech . 132.3.Prosody: Prominence and chunking . 163.Commentaries to individual excerpts . 203.1.Weak forms . 203.1.1.s3 m2 120.6: what you do is you go down towards them and when you get . 203.1.2.s4 m2 60.8: just ignore the atomic bomb your road basically goes slightly tothe left and then straight up. 233.2.Connected speech aspects . 263.2.1.s4 m2 376.2: it crosses over it and goes . 263.2.2.s3 m2 117.5: okay do you want me to go under A-gray e- grade eggs . 303.3.Exercises with sample answers . 373.3.1.s3 m2 73.8: and then it goes in between the two speech pens . 383.3.2.s4 m2 200.2: they’re quite close together so where you were in the middle ofthe fantasy god you just go straight down . 434.Conclusion . 512

1. IntroductionThe goal of the study material presented in this book is to offer a guide to exploring the patternsand habits English native speakers use when speaking. The book is divided into four sections.In this first introductory section, I present the motivation behind the book in greater detail insubsection 1.1. The description of the corpus and material selected for sample analyses togetherwith the list of files provided for readers and analyzed in this book are included in subsection1.2. The last subsection 1.3 presents a description of the approach to the analysis of spontaneousspeech taken in this book. It is instrumental for framing the material in the subsequent sectionsand provides a broader context for the readers’ engagement and hands-on exploration in thesesections.Section 2 presents a very brief crash course to the basic suprasegmental aspects of fluentspeech. It assumes that the readers have a good grasp of the theoretical issues related to theaspects of prosody and connected speech in English from the lectures, textbooks, and othermaterial. Additionally, some familiarity with the segmental aspects, especially thecharacterization of the activity of articulators is also assumed. Hence, the readers are stronglyencouraged to consult other resources such as course texts, lecture notes, and supplementarymaterial to gain fuller understanding of these concept if needed. The aim of Section 2 is not toprovide a condensed form of the theoretical aspects of the suprasegmental aspects and replacethese other course material. I should warn that the description in this section is neither completenor sufficient. Rather, this crash course provides a road map to one way of how the material inthis book might be approached. The section is divided into three subsections covering weakforms (subsection 2.1), connected speech aspects such as assimilations, elisions and linking(subsection 2.2), and the prosodic structure (subsection 2.3).Section 3 is the core of the book and presents the commentaries and analyses of sixindividual excerpts; two in each of the three subsections. The following approach was employedin this section. For each excerpt I first sketch a basic prosodic analysis (described below in thecrash course section). The first subsection 3.1 concentrates on weak forms and their detaileddiscussion is presented after the prosodic structure is analyzed. The second subsection 3.2expands the coverage and after the discussion of the prosodic structure and weak forms addsthe analysis of assimilations, elisions, and linking. This is to facilitate hands on practice withanalyzing these phenomena as they are covered during the classes. Finally, the third subsection3

3.3 presents two excerpts with a complete analysis putting together all the phenomena coveredin this book.Section 4 includes brief concluding remarks.Importantly, in no way is the goal of the book to provide some definite analyses for youto ‘learn’. Rather, I invite you to engage with speech, compare your own awareness of speechpatterns with those in my commentaries, be curious, and ask (yourself or your instructor duringthe seminars and lectures) if alternative analyses or understandings are possible. In essence,many situations will lend themselves to different analyses, or, in other words, the evidence infront of you might be interpreted differently. If you support you own analysis with reasonablearguments, this is what is very valuable and in fact preferable to providing a ‘correct’ analysisand not understanding the underlying principles governing such analysis. In this process, Ibelieve you learn vital skills usable in almost any line of your future careers such as findingpatterns in data, applying understanding to novel situations, forming hypotheses and checkingthem with data (evidence), using computer software for supporting your conclusions, andhopefully many others.1.1. MotivationThere is a relatively wide variety of available resources for practicing the pronunciation ofindividual words in English. Students can nowadays use various online resources andapplications portable to computers or smartphones. They might include either online Englishdictionaries or various computer assisted pronunciation learning tools that enable recordingstudents voices and giving feedback on their match between their and the model pronunciations.These online dictionaries and applications also usually provide both the sound files to use forimitating and improving thus student’s pronunciation as well as the transcription of the wordsin the form of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).However, resources describing the prosodic and connected speech phenomena such asweak forms, assimilations, or reductions of the dictionary citation form of the words when theyare produced in real continuous speech are much more difficult to find. Therefore, the primarygoal of this resource material accompanying classes of English phonetics and phonology is tohelp students increase awareness of these processes and provide practice in describing themboth using IPA transcription options but more importantly verbal descriptions.It is hoped that when students engage with the real recordings using Praat, read thedescriptions of the phenomena provided in the text, and finally try exercises to describe these4

phenomena on their own and compare with the sample answers, the students acquire theunderstanding of these phenomena that will enable them to analyze novel speech excerpts inthis informed way. Moreover, this understanding is, in my opinion, instrumental, in thestudents’ efforts at limiting their non-native accent when speaking English. The dissecting ofspeech into individual chunks, phrases and words allows the students to practice and form newspeech habits at every unit of analysis, progressively going from words, to junctures, to chunksand finally to entire utterances.1.2. MaterialAll the speech material was recorded as part of the Maptask Corpus (Beňuš et al. 2010) designedfor research in the pronunciation patterns of Slovak speakers of English. The recordings comefrom the maptasks section of the corpus, in which two interlocutors seating back to back toprevent their visual contact have to jointly and collaboratively replicate a path from the startpoint to the end point depicted on the map of one interlocutor (Direction giver) to the map ofthe another interlocutor (Direction follower). The path passes various objects on the map (suchas ‘football pitch’, ‘black X’, ‘coast beach’, ‘still pool’, etc.) and there are slight variations inthe objects and their positions between the maps of the two interlocutors to increase thedifficulty of the task and promt spontaneous spoken interaction. Hence, speakers have to usenatural communicative strategies seeking real pragmatic goals and resolving the differencesbetween the maps in order to achieve a successful completion of the task. This design results ina very spontaneous-like interactional dialogues resembling speech in normal situational contextand limits the effects of (read) laboratory speech (e.g. see review in Xu 2010) and the observer’sparadox (Labov 1972) referring to the wish of the experimenter to collect natural speech datafrom subjects but also the unwitting and necessary influence of the experimenter and therecording situation on the collected data.All the excerpts used in the demonstrations come from a single maptask dialoguebetween two Australian female speakers who participated in data collection in 2009. They bothworked as English lecturers in Slovakia at that time. The reason to include Australian Englishin the excerpts analyzed in this book was mainly to increase exposure to a lesser known varietyof English and thus to balance the British and American varieties that are dominant in theexperience of most students of English Phonetics in Slovakia.The table below shows file names included in the accompanying material to this book,text transcript of what was said, and broad IPA transcription of British English including only5

the strong forms and the dictionary transcription of individual words. Hence, this IPAtranscription is NOT the transcription of what the person actually said but the initial stage forour discussion, in which we discuss differences between this abstract non-existent word-byword pronunciation and the actual fluent speech of the native speakers. The files marked in boldwill be analyzed in this book. The remaining files are included for the students to attempt andpractice their own analyses along the lines of the sample analyses provided in the book.File IDTextIPA (broad, dictionary, British)s3 m2 73.8and then it goes in between the ænd ðɛn ɪt gəʊz ɪn bɪˈtwiːn ðə tuː spiːʧpɛnztwo speech penss3 m2 103.0 do you have a coast beachduː juː hæv ə kəʊst biːʧs3 m2 117.5 ok do you want me to goˈəʊˈkeɪ duː juː wɒnt miː tuː gəʊs3 m2 120.6 what you do is you go down wɒt juː duː ɪz juː gəʊ daʊn təˈwɔːdztowards them and when you getðɛm ænd wɛn juː gɛts3 m2 192.3 the top left corner of the football ðə tɒp left kɔ:nə əv ðə ‘fʊtbɔ:l pɪtʃpitchs3 m2 249.2 no black xnəʊ blæk ekss3 m2 356.8 closer to the edge of the paper than ‘kləʊsə tʊ ðɪ eʤ əv ðə ‘peɪpə ðæn jɔ:zyourss3 m2 387.4 ok let me do the finger hooking əʊ’keɪ let mi: du: əə ‘fɪŋgə ‘hʊkɪŋə’raʊnd θɪŋaround things3 m2 403.9 and I’m just gonna draw it to ænd aɪm ʤʌst ‘gɒnə drɔ: ɪt tʊ hʊkə’raʊnd ðə blæk ekshook around the black Xs3 m2 437.5 it goes through the middle of the ɪt gəʊz θru: ðə ‘mɪdl əv ðə kəʊst bi:tʃcoast beechs3 m2 462.8 do you have a still pool? Do you dʊ jʊ hæv ə stɪl pu:l dʊ jʊ hæv ə stɪlhave a still pool anywhere? So my pu:l ‘enɪweə səʊ maɪ stɪl pu:l maɪt bi:still pool might be where your weə jɔ: ə’tɒmɪk bɒm ɪzatomic bomb iss3 m2 498.1 I have got wide bits of metalaɪ hæv gɒt waɪd bɪts əv metls3 m1 47.5and the giant peachænd ðə ʤaɪnt pi:tʃs4 m2 43.6where’s the atomic bombweəz ðɪ ə’tɒmɪk bɒm6

s4 m2 60.8just ignore the atomic bomb your ʤʌst ɪgnɔ: ðɪ ə’tɒmɪk bɒm jɔ: rəʊdroad basically goes slightly to the ‘beɪsɪkli gəʊz ‘slaɪtli tʊ ðə left ændðen streɪt ʌpleft and then straight ups4 m2 174.2 what you need to do is stop before wɒt jʊ ni:d tʊ du: ɪz stɒp bɪ’fɔ: ju: getyou get above the football pitchə’bʌv ðə ‘fʊtbɔ:l pɪtʃs4 m2 200.2 they’re quite close together so ðeɪ ə kwaɪt kləʊs tə’geðə səʊ weə ju:where you were in the middle of wɜ: ɪn ðə ‘mɪdl əv ðə ‘fæntəsɪ gɒd ju:the fantasy god you just go ʤʌststraight downs4 m2 323.5 and it goes maybe a centimeterænd ɪt gəʊz meɪbi ə ,sentɪ’mi:təs4 m2 376.2 it crosses over it and goesɪt ‘krɒsɪz ‘əʊvə ɪt ænd gəʊzs4 m2 460.1 in the top right hand corner of the ɪn ðə tɒp raɪt hænd kɔ:nə əv ðə peɪʤpages4 m2 475.5 hang on hang on not north west hæŋ ɒn hæŋ ɒn nɒt nɔ:θ west nɔ:θ i:stnorth easts4 m2 487.8 you go to the very bottom corner left jʊ gəʊ tʊ ðə veri ‘bɒtəm kɔ:nə leftcornerkɔ:nəs4 m2 495.1 have you got wide bits of metalhæv ju: gɒt waɪd bɪts əv metl1.3. Notes on the approach taken in the bookThe pronunciation aspects of connected speech are naturally more challenging than thepronunciation patterns when practicing the dictionary forms of individual words. There areseveral aspects of the discussion in this book that I would like to highlight and encourage youto always bear in mind when you engage with the actual sound clips.First, you need to bear in mind that whenever we are trying to isolate a single aspect ofpronunciation for instructive and pedagogical reasons; i.e. to describe what native speakers doin this particular situation and context, that aspect of pronunciation is never isolated from othersuprasegmental aspects of speaking arising from the situational context. To give an example,consider the instruction from the describer ‘go to the left and then straight up’ and the realizationof linking the words ’and’ and ‘then’. There are several options including the weak form withthe elision of ‘d’ [ən], nasal place assimilation when the alveolar [n] becomes dental [n̪]anticipating the dental place of articulation of the following [ð], or the full realization of [ənd]7

or even the strong form of [ænd]. How these two words will be linked together by the speakerdepends crucially on the way she chunks this information, or in other words, where she decidesto make a prosodic boundary. She might say this as one chunk, or may split this into two (ormore) chunks and thus ‘go to the left // and then straight up’, or ‘go to the left and // then straightup’ are both possible, although the first is more likely than the second. With the prosodicboundary between ‘and’ and ‘then’, the chances of elision and assimilation are much lower thanwithout the break. In addition to the chunking decisions, the placement of accent, or prominenceon the word ‘then’ also affect the realization of the linking with the previous ‘and’. Andsimilarly many other decisions.Hence, we are trying to understand the choices the speaker has at her disposal and shouldbe always aware that the particular suprasegmental aspects that we currently discuss are alwaysintertwined with other linguistic and paralinguistic aspects of speaking and never isolated fromthe situational context. For this reason, the discussion of each excerpt will begin with the basicanalysis of prosody (chunking into units and identifying the prosodically highlighted words),then we will proceed with the aspects of connected speech.The first point described above is closely linked to the second aspect that you should beaware of when reading the descriptions and improving your understanding of speakingbehavior. Our goal is definitely not to say what ‘correct’ and what ‘incorrect’ pronunciation is.In other words, the approach of the book is not prescriptive. Rather, the aim is to build yourawareness of the speech patterns like elision or assimilation and improve your understandinghow they are realized in a particular prosodic context. This, in turn, will enable you to analyzea novel excerpt of speech or dialogue on your own and describe in your own words what ismost likely happening in the speaker’s mouth and why. In other words, our approach isdescriptive in that we are trying to understand how the skilled behavior of speaking iseffortlessly adapted to the situation similarly to how other forms of skilled behavior (sport,playing an instrument, handicraft, etc.) manage the same. Hence, rather than saying what aspeaker should do, we are trying to understand the choices she has at her disposal and thereasons leading her to pick some of them.This descriptive approach is fundamentally different for us as non-native speakers fromsome other aspects of speaking. For example, take the problem of word stress. With word stressthere is a ‘correct’ solution. Specifically, we can check with a dictionary which syllable receives8

the primary and which, if any, the secondary stress.1 With sufficient perseverance and devotionin practicing, we can work on changing those habits that we, being non-native speakers, havedeveloped erroneously. For example, many Slovaks would say ‘event’ as [ˈi:vent] instead of[ɪˈvent]. Hence, the resource is available in the dictionary, feedback is provided by the instructorwhen the mistake is identified, and with sufficient practice of the word with correct stressplacement in many contexts and situations, non-native speakers may replace the problematichabit with a new one that is more native-like.However, with connected speech aspects we do not have this gold standard and our nonnative habits reside in linking a particular realization of words in particular context, which isnot ‘wrong’ per se, just not what the majority of native speakers would do in such context.Hence, to break these types of non-native habits, we have to understand the link between therealization and context, and only then we can go on to practice replacing the old habit affectedby native language interference with one that is more native-like.Finally, the third aspect, again closely linked and briefly mentioned in the discussion ofthe previous two aspects above, is the role of social context and pragmatic goals incommunication. There are many situations in which people have a tendency to hyper-articulateor enunciate their speech. For example, imagine two friends talking in a noisy bar with loudmusic and speech from other people around, or when a nurse explains the instructions formedicine taking to a senior patient with bad hearing, or when parents want to set clear limits tochildren who do not want to obey some routine, and repeat for the third time that the child isnot to touch something. Or many other similar situations in which the context, the pragmaticgoals of the speakers and other aspects favor speech that is hyper-articulated. You can comparethese situations with similar contexts that normally result in hypo-articulated speech; forexample when the bar is quiet with no music and no people, or when the patient has goodhearing, or when the parents calmly tell the kid for the first time not to touch something. Hence,the continuum between hypo- and hyper-articulation is dependent on the situational context.Because speech in situations favoring hyper-articulation is typically louder, slower, has greaterpitch range and more accented words than speech in the hypo-articulation contexts, theconnected speech aspects are naturally also changing depending on this situational context.1It might be, however, that context might affect the realization of primary and secondary stresses. The example Ioften use is the ‘Japanese’ realized as [,ʤæpə’ni:s] in ‘Do you speak Japanese?’ but as [‘ʤæpə,ni:s] in ‘

goal of this resource material accompanying classes of English phonetics and phonology is to help students increase awareness of these processes and provide practice in describing them both using IPA transcription options but more importantly verbal descriptions. It is hoped that when students engage with the real recordings using Praat, read the

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