The accentual structure of English language

‘music – mu’sician

дóма – домá;

чýдная - чуднáя

Oppositions are also found among compound verbs:

to 'switch 'on - to 'switch 'off

'to turn 'on - to 'turn 'off             

Words with meaningful prefixes are likewise semantically opposed to those without prefixes. Compare:

'educated - 'un'edueated             

'please - 'dis'please             

'cyclone - 'anti'cyclon             

,under’stand' - 'misunder'stand             

Compound numerals have naturally two equal stresses, making both elements significant, e.g. 'twenty-three, 'sixty-'five.

Numerals with the -teen suffix are marked by two stresses to oppose them to the numerals with the unstressed suffix -ty. If the suffix -teen is not stressed the vowel [i:] in it is shortened and obscured, the sonant [n] is weakened, there is consequently a danger of misunderstariding, e.g.             

- 'What ,page is it? ||

- ‘Seven,teen. ||

- ‘Seven,teen | or ,seventy? |||

The above-given illustrations show how important it is in teaching practice to make the students realize that the accentual structure of words is conditioned by the semantic interrelation of their elements. The teacher should attract the students' attention to the correlation between the accentual and semantic structures of words which will save the students many mistakes. The regulation of the accentuation in the Russian language is too complicated and is practically unpredictable. The stress may fall on the same morpheme in the derivatives where word-formation is performed by the grammatical means alone, e.g. кожа — кожи — кожей - кожу; год — годы — годом. In another group of words the stress may effect different morphemes of the word participating in the word-formation alongside with the grammatical means, e.g. сад—сады — садами — садом; пар — пары - парами-— паром; but: пара — пары — парами — парам:

RI.Avanesov considers the variability in the placement of the Russian word stress an individual sign of every particular word which presents a difficulty for foreign learners and sometimes for the natives. It is interesting to note that Russian word stress may have stylistic distinction and poetic usage, cf. молодéц — мóлодец, девúца - дéвица, шéлковый —шелкóвый.

'The complicated system of the accentual structure of English words makes teacher trainees be very attentive to the subject. The typical mistakes of Russian learners in the sphere of word stress are the rnispronunciation of: 1) words with the main and secondary stresses (,conver'sational); 2) words with two equal stresses in connected speech {up'stairs, 're'organize); 3) words with the full vowel in the unstressed syllable ('architect). ;

The instability of English accentual structure of words presents much difficulty for Russian learners. Students' attention should be attracted to English multisyllabic words the accentual structure of which is regulated by the rhythmical tendency and the use of the secondary stress in those words, as it has no anal-ogy in the Russian language, compare: 'transpor'tation - транспортировка, de,mocrati'zation — демократизация.

Another group of words presenting difficulty for Russian learners is large group of compounds which are marked either by two equal stresses (compound adjectives) or by one stress (compound nouns). The semantic factor in defining the accentual structure of compounds should be most decisive, as it has been illustrated above. One more group of words requires learners' attention, the group which forms accentual oppositions of different parts of speech by way of conversion accompanied by the shifting of stress, e.g. 'combine (n) — com’bine (v), 'insult (n) — in’sult (v).

In case of doubt it is advisable to consult a pronouncing.

1.3 Overview of English accents

Before looking at examples of differences between accents, it might help to have a sense of what the major accents are and where they're spoken. But you can safely skip this subsection if you prefer.

The British Isles

There is no "British" accent. England, Scotland, Ireland, and possibly Wales all have their own unofficial standard accents, and the standards of Scotland and Ireland in particular are as different from that of England as American accents are. The standard, or prestige, accent of England is usually referred to as Received Pronunciation (RP). This is what the royal family, all recent Prime Ministers, and most BBC announcers speak. It is probably what most Americans think of as an "English" accent, though it is spoken as a native accent by no more than about 10% of the English population. It differs most noticeably from General American in the pronunciation of a few vowels and in the way /r/ is treated following vowels. For example, in RP there would be no [r] sounds at all in the phrase the northern fourth of the park.

Within England there are many identifiable regional accents, probably more than in the United States in fact. Among these, London accent (sometimes called "Cockney") stands out because it is familiar to many Americans through film and drama characters such as Eliza Dolittle in "Pygmalion/My Fair Lady" and because it has a number of very characteristic features. Many of the vowels in this accent differ considerably from RP (and General American). Other very striking features are the loss of initial /h/ ("'e 'as an 'ard 'eart" = "he has a hard heart") and the frequent glottal stops in place of other stops in other accents ("iʔ'll taʔe a loʔ o' time to seʔle" = "it'll take a lot of time to settle"). Perhaps the other major accent boundary in England separates the accents of the north from those of the south. Americans may be familiar with northern England English through the speech of the Beatles or the characters in films such "The Full Monty". These accents can be identified fairly easily because they make no distinction between the vowels /ʌ/ and /ʊ/; both are pronounced like /ʊ/.

Scottish and Irish English share one feature with northern England English; the tense vowels /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/ are not pronounced as diphthongs, as they are in RP (and General American). In addition, these accents are like General American, and unlike most accents of England, in how they treat /r/ after vowels.

The Western Hemisphere

The unofficial standard accent of the United States is usually called General American (GA). This is the accent of much of the Midwest and the West and the most frequent accent for US newscasters, though, interestingly, only five of the last ten US Presidents have spoken it. As the prestige accent, it has been encroaching on some regional accents, for example, in the northeast, but at the same time, changes within GA are creating what amount to new accents. One striking example of this is Northern Cities accent, spoken in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Rochester, and distinct from GA in the pronunciation of lax vowels.

Almost everyone is familiar with Southern US accent, spoken by people mainly in the southeastern part of the country. Like London accent, this accent has strikingly different vowels from other English accents. African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect associated with an ethnic group rather than a region, though of course you don't have to be African-American to have learned it. The accent associated with this dialect is similar in many ways to Southern US accent, while the grammar has its own characteristic properties.

People from the northeastern US are often easy to identify by their accents; the accent of New York City stands out within this region, again mostly for its vowels. Some other US cities, especially Pittsburgh, are known for particular pronunciation conventions. In Pittsburgh, for example, [a] may be used where GA has /aw/, so downtown may be [,dan'tan].

Standard Canadian English (except in the province of Newfoundland) is very similar to General American, and it doesn't vary much from place to place. Two features that can help identify Canadians are their pronunciation of /ay/ and /aw/, which we'll learn about later, and a tendency to use rising pitch at the end of some statements as well as questions.

English is the native language of much of the Caribbean, with some features common to the region and others specific to particular islands. Americans may be familiar with Caribbean English through the speech of Jamaican performers of reggae music. As with other accents, there are characteristic vowels in these accents, and in addition, a tendency in the Caribbean, as there is in some US accents, to make no distinction between /t/ and /θ/ and between /d/ and /ð/. Jamaican English in particular also has quite striking intonation patterns.

The Southern Hemisphere

English is the native language of most Australians and New Zealanders and a sizable minority of South Africans. While the standard English accents of these countries tend to approach RP, the broad accents of most English speakers in all three countries have tense (long) vowels similar to those in London accent. The lax (short) front vowels of Australian and New Zealand English differ from those in other accents. Americans are likely to be familiar with these features from the speech of actors such as the Australian Paul Hogan.

Non-native accents

English is spoken as a second language by millions of people, especially in regions that were once colonized by Britain in South Asia and Africa. In some of these regions there are particular English pronunciation conventions that derive from the phonology of the local languages. So in the English of South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Bhutanese, and Maldivians), the alveolar consonants /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ tend to be replaced by retroflex consonants, an important place of articulation for consonants in the languages of this region. Some of these conventions may be viewed as belonging to a kind of non-native regional or national English standard. These non-native standards are one of the ways in which English is becoming even more of an international language.

Phonetic differences

You learn that the phoneme /e/ is pronounced [yɛ] in Jamaican English. As a speaker of General American, how easy would it be for you to master this aspect of a Jamaican accent?

Probably the most common sort of difference between accents is purely phonetic. A phoneme in one accent corresponds perfectly to a phoneme in another accent, so we can consider it to be the same phoneme, but it differs in its precise realization, that is, how it is articulated and perceived.

How to make your /o/s sound English or Irish or Scottish

Take the vowel /o/. In GA, this is pronounced as a diphthong beginning as a rounded mid back vowel and ending as a rounded high back vowel (or semivowel): [oʊ]. In RP, on the other hand, this same phoneme has a slightly different realization. It begins as an unrounded mid central vowel and ends as a rounded high back vowel: [əʊ]. In other accents, such as Irish, Scottish, and northern English, /o/ is not a diphthong at all; it is realized as [o]. But since the set of words in GA with [oʊ] is the same as the set of words in RP with [əʊ] (with perhaps a few exceptions) and the other accents with [o], we can see these as the same phoneme. If you're a speaker of GA, and you want to sound English, one thing you could do would be to simply pronounce all instances of /o/ in your speech as [əʊ], just as a speaker of RP could pronounce all instances of /o/ as /oʊ/ as a part of affecting an American accent.

Another similar example concerns the vowel /ɑ/, as in the words hot, sock, and rob. In RP, this vowel is pronounced in roughly the same position as it is in GA (that is, with the same height and backness), but in RP it is somewhat rounded (leading some Americans to think that the RP vowel in these words is /ɔ/). Sometimes a different symbol is used for the vowel in fact. But this difference between the accents is a bit more complicated than this because, as we'll see below, it applies to only some instances of /ɑ/ in GA.

For English vowels, the pattern of phonetic differences between accents is often more extensive than just the correspondences between individual phonemes. The realization of a number of vowel phonemes in one accent may correspond to different realizations for all of those phonemes in another accent. This may be true for the lax ("short") vowels or the tense ("long") vowels or both.

Let's compare the tense vowels, including the diphthongs, of GA and London accent. These accents have the same set of tense vowel phonemes, which we have been writing using the symbols /i, e, u, o, ay, aw, ɔy/, but each is realized differently in the two accents, in some cases, very differently. The first figure below summarizes what you already know about the tense vowels of GA. Recall that each of these vowels is actually pronounced like a diphthong, though this is not reflected in the symbols used for /i, e, o, u/ and it may be difficult to hear or feel for /i/ and /u/. Each line represents one of the phonemes, and it is labeled with a word containing the phoneme (written in the same color as the line). Circles at one end or the other of an arrow represent rounding, and the arrows next to the words show the direction of the diphthong. The second figure shows the corresponding vowels in London accent. Click on the words to hear my imitation of a Londoner saying them. The colors in the two figures represent phonemes that correspond, though in some cases they differ considerably in their phonetic realization, as you can see.

How "phoned Ray" in London sounds like "found rye" in Indianapolis

The main point to note here is that there is a clear correspondence between the GA and London vowel phonemes, even though the correspondences might not be reflected in the symbols that we use to represent the phonemes. For example, we have been using /e/ to represent the vowel in bait, but [e] is very far from the vowel in this word in London; for London accent, a better symbol would be [aɪ], which of course is the realization of a completely different phoneme in GA, the one in the word bite. So when we are talking about two phones in different accents, there are two ways we can compare them, phonetically and phonemically/lexically. Phonetically, the vowel [aɪ] in London, as in the word bait, is quite similar to the vowel [aɪ] in GA, as in the word bite. But phonemically or lexically, the vowel [aɪ] in London functions the same way as the vowel [eɪ], that is, /e/, in GA.

Phonemic differences

You're a young speaker of a Caribbean accent in which there is no /θ/ or /ð/ phoneme (thing is /tɪŋ/; this is /dɪs/). When you start school, you're expected to learn a prestige accent in which distinctions are made between /t/ and /θ/ and between /d/ and /ð/. In what ways might this be difficult for you?

Another possibilitity is that two accents may differ in the number of phonemes. That is, a distinction that is made in one accent and used contrastively is not made in the other accent. This means that some words that contrast in one accent may sound the same in the other accent.

I have already mentioned two examples of this phenomenon. Many, perhaps most, speakers of GA and Canadian English do not make a distinction between the phonemes /ɔ/ and /ɑ/; they have a single phoneme instead. The actual phonetic character of the sound varies somewhat; it is more like [ɑ] for Americans but more like [ɔ] for many Canadians. The point is that the speakers do not distinguish words from one another using a distinction between [ɑ] and [ɔ]. Pairs of words like the following are distinct in other English accents, but they sound the same for these speakers.

1.                 awed, odd

2.                 dawn, Don

3.                 cawed, cod

4.                 caught, cot

In these accents, there is a distinction between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ before /r/, for example, in pairs such as car and core, part and port, lard and lord. But in this same context, there is no distinction between /ɔ/ and /o/, so we could consider a word such as core to be /kor/ rather than /kɔr/.

Because these pairs of words sound the same in this accent, there is a potential problem for the hearer that does not exist in an accent where the distinction is made. We know that this feature of this accent is relatively new; that is, the earlier distinction made in this and other accents has been lost (and is apparently being lost by more and more speakers). Given the problem that hearers have distinguishing words like the pairs above, how can such a change take place? In fact it turns out that there are very few such pairs. The additional burden on the hearer is apparently small enough that the loss of the distinction is tolerated by speakers and hearers of the accent.

Another example was also mentioned earlier, the lack of a distinction between the phonemes /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ in accents of northern England. For these speakers there is a single phoneme, normally pronounced [ʊ]. So the following words, which sound different in most other accents, are pronounced in the same way by these speakers.

5.                 cud, could

6.                 buck, book

7.                 luck, look

8.                 putt, put

9.                 stud, stood

In this case, unlike that of /ɑ, ɔ/ in North America, it is the accent that fails to make the distinction that is more conservative; Middle English did not make a distinction between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. In any case, as before, the lack of a distinction does not leave hearers for this accent handicapped because there are not many pairs of words distinguished only by this difference.

As a final example of phonemic differences in English vowels, consider how the vowel /ɑ/ in GA corresponds to vowels in RP. In GA this vowel appears in words where it is spelled "o" — hot, shock, stop — and words where it is spelled "a" — father, part, carve. In RP, on the other hand, these sets of words have different vowels, a short, rounded, low, back vowel in the first set (which I'll write with /ɑ/ even though it differs a little from GA /ɑ/) and a long, unrounded, low, back vowel in the second set (which I'll write /ɑ:/). That is, in RP, the words father and bother do not rhyme. Most of the words with /ɑ:/ in RP have an /r/ in GA that does not appear in RP, as we'll see below. This means that, even though RP has two vowel phonemes where GA has one, there are few if any words that are distinguished in RP but not in GA. For example, a pair such as pot and part is distinguished by the consonant (/r/) in GA but by the vowel in RP (GA: /pɑt/, /pɑrt/; RP: /pɑt/, /pɑ:t/).

But RP /ɑ:/ also corresponds to many words that have /æ/ in GA. Some words are pronounced with /æ/ in both accents, for example, gas, bad, can, and lamp. Other words with /æ/ in GA are pronounced with /ɑ:/ in RP, for example, glass, rather, can't, and laugh. Note that there is in general no way to predict from the context which words will have /æ/ and which will have /ɑ:/ in RP. Thus an American trying to imitate an RP accent will have to remember which words have which phoneme. This is difficult and leads to frequent over-generalization mistakes such as the pronunciation of gas as /gɑs/ or stand as /stɑnd/ in American attempts at imitating RP.

Differences in the number of English consonant phonemes are not as common, but there are some. In a number of accents, especially in the Caribbean, in London, in AAVE, and in some US cities, the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ do not exist as separate phonemes. Where other accents have these phonemes, these accents have either /t/ and /d/ or /f/ and /v/. So in accents where /θ/ is not distinguished from /t/ and /ð/ is not distinguished from /d/, each of the following pairs of words would sound the same.

10.             tin, thin

11.             tie, thigh

12.             boat, both

13.             true, through

14.             tread, thread

15.             den, then

16.             ride, writhe

In these accents an older distinction has been lost, but as with /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ in North America, the loss apparently does not seriously interfere with communication because there are not too many pairs of words that end up as homophones with the loss of the distinction.

Going from an accent with fewer to an accent with more distinctions is difficult.

Going back and forth between two accents is more complicated when the number of phonemes differs than when there are only phonetic differences. Say a speaker of GA or Canadian English who does not make the distinction between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ wants to learn or to imitate the speech of someone from London or New York or Houston, all places where the distinction between these two phonemes is made. The problem is that words with these phones in this person's mental lexicon are all represented in terms of one vowel category, whereas the same words are represented in terms of two different categories in the mental lexicons of speakers of other accents. For each word, say, caught or hawk or hot or lock, the speaker will have to figure out which vowel in the other accent is appropriate. But unless the speaker has learned this for each word, this will be impossible. In this situation, speakers often make mistakes, over-extending either one or the other phone. For example, a North American speaker might overuse /ɔ/ in trying to speak with an RP accent, using this vowel for words like hot and lock. In the same way, a speaker from northern England trying to speak with an RP accent, might over-extend the vowel /ʌ/, using it for words normally containing /ʊ/ such as sugar and cushion.

Note that a speaker going in the other direction would not have the same problem. A speaker of RP would just have to remember to pronounce both /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ in the same way when imitating GA and to pronounce /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ in the same way when imitating an accent of northern England.

Chapter II. The questions of typology of accentual structure