Suprasegmentals Flashcards
What are segmentals?
Individual phonemes and their coarticulation
Part of the broad transcriptions we’ve been doing. It’s the basic Cs and Vs.
What are supragmentals?
Unlike isolated sounds, connected speech has continual modifications and alterations in stress, timing, and voice pitch and very important to meaning.
What are the four parts of the quadrants of suprasegmentals?
Stress
Intonation
Tone (doesn’t affect English)
Length (doesn’t affect English)
What are the 3 types of stress?
Lexical
- In Multi-syllabic words
Grammatical
- In Word pairs
Contrastive
- Speaker emphasis
Explain lexical stress:
Lexical: You know this one. It’s the stressed/unstressed we’ve been talking about all semester, where stress is: a bit louder, a bit longer, and a little bit higher pitched.
The stress that is embedded into the pronunciation of the word. It’s why the phrase, “put the emPHASis on the wrong syLABBle” is funny – it’s an unexpected production of those multisyllabic words.
What is Grammatical stress?
It’s the words that change stress based on their part of speech.
This is the relative stress within a two syllable word, where changing the stress changes the word’s meaning. (σ = syllable)
Typically, 2-σ nouns’ and adjectives’ primary stress is on the 1st σ.
Typically, 2-σ verbs’ primary stress is on the 2nd σ.
The proper placement of stress is important for meaning!
What is Contrastive stress?
It’s how a specific speaker chooses to emphasize whole words based on desired meaning.
We can vary the meaning by emphasizing different words.
What is sentential stress?
*Sentence Stress (Not a RULE!)
In a natural manner, say the sentence, “I drove to school.”
You probably stressed the last word: “I drove to school.”
It’s common for the last word of a sentence or phrase to be emphasized.
“To be good at dancing tango, you will have to practice more.”
What are function words?
Function words carry information, but it’s grammatical information, and not salient to the meaning as much as content words.
The function words:
pronouns articles prepositions conjunctions
Sounds in these words often reduce:
-Vowels move toward the middle of the quad (even becoming a true schwa). The diacritic for centralizing vowels: [ ̈ ]
-Consonants are under-articulated or omitted entirely
Explain Contrastrive stress.
We can vary the meaning by emphasizing different words.
How does new information affect the emphasis in a conversation?
New information added to a conversation is often emphasized.
A: You got a new purse.
B: Yeah, I got it at the mall.
A: Which mall?
B: The one downtown.
A: Which store?
B: I got it at Green’s
A: Was it expensive?
B: It was on sale.
Explain intonation:
The continuous modification of vocal pitch in continuous speech.
The pitch modification cues a listener as to what type of utterance is being spoken
e.g.: a statement
a question
an exclamation
(to a certain extent) emotional state
Give an example of intonation with the sentence ‘‘I did’’.
It can answer many different questions, but it can change drastically.
“Did you read the paper today?” “I did.” flat, a statement
“Have you cleaned your room yet?” “I DID.”
emphasis on “did”
“Who ate the pie?” “I did.” emphasis on “I”
(Change in sentence stress and intonation in these examples)
What are two types of typical intonation patterns?
Falling and Raising
Explain Falling intonation:
-Falling intonation [↘︎]
-unemotional
-declarative
-“wh” questions
-surprise statements
What are the particularities of falling intonational phrases?
Can be quite neutral, unemotional statements:
What is a particularity of falling intonation in declarative statements?
Declarative statements also fall at the end, but with emphasis on a word (usually) at the end.
Here, we see a rise-fall pattern. Note that the rise-fall is over the vowel in the stressed syllable of the word.
What are some patterns of most declarative statements?
Most declarative statements are like this, slightly falling with a rise-fall pattern over the important word, focussed around the most stressed vowel.
What would be the intonation patterns with Wh questions?
“Wh” questions begin with: where, what, why, when, which, how, and they often have the rise-fall pattern at the end.
What would be the intonation pattern in the statements of surprise?
The rise-fall pattern is still mapped over the stressed vowel.
What are the particularities of yes/no questions in raising intonation?
Yes/no questions have the classic raising intonation at the end.
Here, we can have rises without falling, or a rise pattern (with no fall).
What is the pattern of Raising intonation in lists?
In a list of items, each item in the list with rise (or before a comma)
What would be the raising intonation at the end of a phrase?
There’s an unfinished feeling when the intonation raises at the end of a phrase.
The listener probably is cued that there is more, so the conversational turn has not yet transferred to the other speaker.
Q: how does this relate back to uptalk?
What would be elements of pragmatics in communication?
-Rate of speech
-Volume of speech
-Eye contact
-Turn-taking
-Proxemics
-Gestures
-Facial Expression
