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Pronunciation rules
When you listen to native speakers, you hear several clusters of sounds that you can not decipher, which means, you’re not able to make out what words these sound clusters represent. Although they actually stand for everyday words that you know very well, these sound clusters don’t sound like anything you know.
A word is pronounced in one way when it’s uttered in individually (that’s its ideal pronunciation); however it’s often pronounced in a slightly different way when it’s spoken in combination with other words.
A non-native English speaking learner finds spoken word groups like these difficult to understand. This is mainly because of two reasons:
1. The non native speaker has learnt the language predominantly in its written form and even though we have spoken the language, it has been done so with the interferences of our native languages. Thus the non native speaker has accustomed himself to hear a certain pronunciation of these words and word groups that are different from the way a native speaker would say them.
2. When it comes to pronunciation training, non native learners, have been trained to pronounce words individually and not as part of word combinations. These pronunciations are also often incorrect and to make things worse, we are not aware or conscious of the intonation, syllable stress, word stress vital to accurate pronunciation.
Points to remember:
• Blank spaces among the words in a written word group have no importance when you utter that word group in connected speech.
• In connected speech, there are no pauses corresponding to the spaces among written words.
• In connected speech, there are normally no pauses between two neighboring words in a word group (except when you make use of a pause as a device in overcoming
hesitation or as a device that helps you compose and speak at the same time).
• In general, there are only pauses between word groups, and not between words. And the words in a word group are spoken as a single, tight, well-knit unit, having no
gaps among them.
• You can even say that, in speech, a group of words is treated as equivalent to a single word — and so the spaces you see among the words (when you write that word
group down) have no relevance at all when you utter them in connected speech.
• Words in English don’t sound the same when they’re pronounced individually (in isolation) as when they’re pronounced as part of a word group in connected speech.
• A word is pronounced in one way when it’s uttered in isolation — that’s its ideal pronunciation.It’s often pronounced in a different way when it’s uttered in combination with other words — that’s its pronunciation in practice.
Tongue movement and phonetics
• When you utter a consonant or a vowel individually, your tongue gets into the ideal position that’s required to produce that sound. When you utter another consonant or vowel after that, the tongue will have to get back from that ideal position, and then get into the ideal position required to produce the new sound. This is only possible when you utter words individually in isolation, because then you’ll be uttering the sounds slowly, and your tongue will have enough time to move from ideal position to ideal position.
• But when words are combined (and uttered aloud) in speech, a cluster of consonants or a cluster of vowels come together, your tongue will have to move from one position to another in quick succession.
• And in that process, the positions to which the tongue moves will not often be the ideal positions required to produce the various sounds. So the consonant sound and the vowel sound the tongue produces in connected speech will be different from the ideal sounds. (The quality of the sounds the tongue actually produces thus would depend on the nature of the neighboring sounds.)
• In English, stressed syllables are normally uttered slowly and clearly, and unstressed syllables are always uttered quickly and far less clearly.
• So when you utter stressed syllables in speech, there’ll be time enough for your tongue to get into the ideal positions required to produce the ideal consonant sounds and vowel sounds.
• But when you utter unstressed syllables, your tongue won’t have enough time to get into the ideal positions required in producing those syllables, because they’re uttered quickly. So when you utter a cluster of unstressed syllables, your tongue gets into such positions as it finds easier to get into from the preceding positions, and not into the ideal positions. As a result, a cluster of unstressed syllables often sounds different in speech from what it might sound if those syllables are pronounced slowly one after another.
• As it’s difficult (and sometimes impossible) for the tongue to move from ideal position to ideal position in connected speech, it only moves from possible position to possible position, and each consonant and each vowel in a cluster will have to adjust to the sounds of the neighboring consonants and vowels. In this process of mutual adjustment, this is what happens: The sounds of various consonant clusters, vowel clusters and consonant-vowel clusters become different from their ideal sounds — because the sounds that the tongue produces are those that it finds easier to produce rather than the ideal sounds. And that’s not all.
• Many consonants and vowels even get left out, and are not pronounced. In other words, in the process of mutual adjustment among neighboring consonants and vowels, a lot of phonetic simplification (of consonant and vowel clusters) takes place.
Remember this: The tongue sometimes finds that it’s easier to utter a cluster of consonants or vowels if it modifies the sounds of some of them or leave them out altogether (without pronouncing them), and that’s when all these phonetic changes happen. So if you want to understand a native speaker of English, you must never expect him to pronounce words with the same precision as he would if he were asked to pronounce them individually.
Intonation and fluency
Now as far as fluency development is concerned, we need to note the following points:
• English is a semi-musical and extremely stressed language.
• You should speak English by uttering stressed syllables distinctly and unstressed syllables with far less.
• This contrast between stressed syllables and unstressed syllables is the key to the rhythm of English speech.
• You should speak English in stress-units called “feet”.
• Each “foot” is made up of a stressed syllable which may (or may not) be followed by one or more unstressed syllables.
• The number of syllables a foot has varies from foot to foot within an idea unit; however you should only take approximately the same amount of time to utter each foot — no matter how many unstressed syllables a foot has.
• You should utter stressed syllables at fairly equal intervals of time.
Rules of Syllable Stress in English:
There are a few very simple rules about syllable stress:
1. One word has only one stress. One word cannot have two stresses. If you hear two stresses, you hear two words. However, there can be a "secondary" stress in some words, but a secondary stress is much smaller than the main (primary) stress, and is normally used in long words.
2. We can only stress vowels, not consonants.
3. A multi-syllable word has a prominent syllable. This is called a stressed syllable.
4. Stressed syllable is longer in duration, higher in pitch, and louder in volume.
5. Duration is the primary attribute to the prominence of a syllable.
6. Usually 2 syllable nouns (90 %+) have the stress on the first syllable; 2 syllable verbs (60 %+) have the stress on the second.
7. Except for the compounds, stressed syllables in words with more than 2 syllables never stand next to each other (Stressed syllables and weak syllables alternate). |
