Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-tn8tq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T22:08:24.448Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Analysing phonetic and phonological variation on the suprasegmental level

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Ulrike Gut
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Münster, Germany
Manfred Krug
Affiliation:
Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
Julia Schlüter
Affiliation:
Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany
Get access

Summary

Introduction

This chapter describes methods of analysing phonetic and phonological variation on the suprasegmental (or prosodic) level. The suprasegmental level comprises all phonological units and processes that are larger than individual speech sounds. Thus, the prosodic features that can be investigated to document language variation and change include:

  • stress placement in words and utterances

  • speech rhythm and

  • intonation.

There are a number of widely accepted research methods for studying and describing phonological and phonetic variation on the suprasegmental level. In Section 2, the auditory (Section 2.1) and the acoustic method (Section 2.2) of analysing word stress are discussed. Section 3 presents methods of analysing variation in speech rhythm. The methods of studying variation in intonation are presented in Section 4. This comprises the auditory method (Section 4.1), the combined auditory-acoustic method (Section 4.2) and the acoustic analysis of pitch and intonation (Section 4.3).

Word stress

Stress is a property of syllables and refers to the relative prominence a syllable has. It is defined as an abstract phonological category that forms part of a speaker’s knowledge: it refers to the speaker’s mental representation of a property of a specific syllable of a word. While in intonation languages such as Mandarin and Igbo stress seems to play a minor role, in other languages words have specific stress patterns. In the case of fixed stress languages, all multisyllabic words of a language have stress on a particular syllable, for example on the last syllable in Turkish or on the penultimate syllable in Welsh. In languages with free lexical stress like English, all content words with two or more syllables have at least one stressed syllable. Which of the syllables is stressed can be at least in part predicted by a set of complex rules (see e.g. Roach 1991: chapters 10 and 11).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ashby, Michael and Maidment, John 2005. Introducing phonetic science. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Mary 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. (Netherlands Phonetic Archives, Vol. 7). Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Mary, Hirschberg, Julia and Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefani 2005. ‘The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework’, in Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.), Prosodic typology: the phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford University Press. 9–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan 1997. Intonation. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gut, Ulrike 2009a. Non-native speech: a corpus-based analysis of the phonological and phonetic properties of L2 English and German. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, Raymond and Read, Charles 2002. The acoustic analysis of speech. 2nd edn. Albany: Delmar, Thompson Learning.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Joseph and Arnold, Gordon 1973. Intonation of colloquial English. 2nd edn. London: Longman.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×