1 a The words have the same stress pattern: strong syllable – weak syllable. Spoken in sequence they have a regular beat – or rhythm.

b It should be possible to say both the isolated words and the whole sentence at the same speed, maintaining the same rhythm by squeezing the small words into the gaps between them:

The exercise demonstrates a distinctive feature of the rhythm of English: the stressed syllables tend to fall at regular intervals, and the intervening, unstressed syllables are accommodated to the rhythm.

2 These are probably the words and syllables that carried the beat:

• a ‘Abercrombie argues that speech is inherently rhythmical.’ (Brazil et al. 1980)

• b ‘The characteristic rhythm of one language may differ considerably from that of another.’ (Brown 1974)

• c ‘The recurrence of stressed syllables at regular intervals gives speech its rhythmical qualities.’ (Wells and Colson 1980)

• d ‘It is plain that this regularity is the case only under certain conditions.’ (Crystal 1980)

Notice that these would not normally be all stressed equally: there is usually one primary stress in an utterance, and one or more secondary stresses. The intervening syllables are unstressed, and the alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (or beats) is what gives the impression of rhythm.

Even though (as Crystal notes) ‘this regularity is the case only under certain conditions’, such as slow and deliberate speech, the notion that English is a ‘stress-timed’ language (like German and Arabic) has a wide currency. ‘Stress-timed’ means that the stressed syllables in an utterance fall at regular intervals and that intervening syllables are accommodated to fit the rhythm, so that different syllables have different lengths. This contrasts with ‘syllable-timed’ languages (such as French or Spanish), where all syllables, whether stressed or not, are the same length.

Notice that the stressed words tend to be nouns, verbs and adjectives, i.e. words that carry the burden of the meaning, as opposed to grammatical words, like articles and auxiliaries. These are accommodated into the rhythm by some form of reduction, usually the replacement of the vowel with a schwa (see Task 5 below).