- Moim zdaniem - powiedziała Meredith - ulice w niebie wybrukowane są czekoladą.

Incidentally, this raises another
difficulty about the model of speech behaviour to be used in the teaching
of pronunciation, as discussed in 1.1.
In other cases where there is no /r/ available, speakers use another con-
sonantal sound which is very close to the first of the two vowels: if the
Connected speech 31
first word ends in a u-type vowel a /w/ is inserted; if the first word ends in
an i-type vowel a /j/ is inserted. As neither is articulated fully, they are
usually rendered like this in a transcription: 'how often' ['hauw'Df9n], 'they
are' ['SeiJ'a:].
Another process which is connected with this is the tendency of English
speakers to treat word-final consonants as if they belonged to the next
word, especially if that word starts with a vowel. This obscuring of the
word boundary leads to famous homophonous pairs such as 'I scream'/'ice
cream', 'an aim'/'a name', 'new display'/'nudist play', or the jocular 'get up
at eight o'clock'/'get a potato clock'. For experienced speakers with plenty
of supplementary knowledge these are hardly ever a problem, as they
normally occur in a context which excludes one of the pair. Inexperienced
learners, however, may have severe difficulties in deciding where the word
boundary lies: is the sequence [keimm] to be analysed as ['kei 'mm] 'Kay
Min' or [keim 'in] 'came in'?
^ TASK 31
Redraw the word-boundaries in the following examples by treating
the final consonant of the first word as if it belonged to the second
word. In which cases is the second 'word' a possible word of the
English language?
Example: came in [kei mm]: 'min' = not a possible word
dish out, rage on, laugh about, grab it, march in, carves up, not at
all, an(d) out, an old dog.
An inexperienced learner may thus hear 'shout', 'John', 'bit', 'chin', or 'tall',
but also [fabaut], [ta], [naut], [sAp], and [naold], and will be left
wondering what these words mean or how they can be made to fit the
context of the conversation. ('Sup' and 'nowt' are English words, but their
currency is restricted.)
We have seen how the connected speech processes of assimilation, elision,
and linking alter the appearance of words, making them differ from the
ideal shape which they have when pronounced in isolation. It is likely that
the experience common to all listeners to a foreign language, namely that
the natives 'speak very fast', is due to this lack of phonetic information
about words and their boundaries.
4 Stress
4.1 The nature of stress
In English, we can use the word 'stress' to refer generally to the way we
emphasize something or give it prominence. So we talk about stressing (or
putting particular stress on) a point: 'I would like to stress that ...' Here,
obviously, we are referring to language at the level of discourse. But we also
use the term to refer more specifically to the sounds of speech. If we listen to
spoken language we can hear that certain elements seem to be given more
prominence or emphasis.
* TASK 32
In your own language, what tells you that a word is stressed?
Write your answer down.
Try to get hold of a stretch of speech from a language you do not
know at all and listen for the stresses.
Maybe you found that it was quite hard to pick out what was stressed and
what was not, even though you were quite sure from your own language
that the stresses seemed distinctly louder than the rest. Apparently it is our
knowledge of the language system that makes us pick out certain cues from
the soundstream and ascribe to them the value 'stress'.
Before looking more closely at what these cues are, we need to be quite
clear that the term stress is used in two different ways. One use is as a
conventional label for the overall prominence of certain syllables over
others. Used in this wider sense, stress does not correlate directly and
simply with one feature such as loudness, but represents the combined
effect of several other factors besides. It is in this general sense that we can
say that Finnish words are stressed on the first syllable, Polish words are
stressed on the last but one, or that the English words 'father' and 'lengthen'
are stressed on the first syllable.
The second, and narrower, use of the term stress is concerned with the way
in which speakers actually achieve this impression of prominence, i.e. its
physiological cause. In this narrower sense, stress refers to the muscular
energy which goes into the production of a syllable.
Stress 33