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Accentuation
Accentuation
Accent, in phonetics, that property of a syllable which makes it stand out in an utterance relative to its neighbouring syllables. The emphasis on the accented syllable relative to the unaccented syllables may be realized through greater length, higher or lower pitch, a changing pitch contour, greater loudness, or a combination of these characteristics.
Accent has various domains: the word, the phrase, and the sentence. Word accent (also called word stress, or lexical stress) is part of the characteristic way in which a language is pronounced. Given a particular language system, word accent may be fixed, or predictable (e.g., in French, where it occurs regularly at the end of words, or in Czech, where it occurs initially), or it may be movable, as in English, which then leaves accent free to function to distinguish one word from another that is identical segmentally (e.g., the noun permit versus the verb permit). Similarly, accent can be used at the phrasal level to distinguish sequences identical at the segmental level (e.g., “light housekeeping” versus “lighthouse keeping,” or “blackboard” versus “black board”). Finally, accent may be used at the sentence level to draw attention to one part of the sentence rather than another (e.g., “What did you sign?” “I signed a contract to do some light housekeeping.” versus “Who signed a contract?” “I signed a contract to do some light housekeeping.”).
The beauty of the English language lies in pronunciation. Accent/stress lends naturalness and beauty to your English. If you can't pronounce words clearly and stress properly, your English might sound like ‘Tinglish’, ‘Tamlish’ or ‘Hinglish’! In phonetics, accent/stress means expending extra breath on a particular syllable in a word. It is a matter of greater prominence and greater audibility.
Accent is very important to make your speech intelligible. For instance, look at the words career /kəriə/ and carrier /kæriə/. Looking at the transcription you can say there is a slight difference between the two in pronunciation. But you can bring out the difference between the two very clearly by accenting them on the right syllables. So in the word career /kə̍riə/ the accent is on the second syllable and in the word carrier /̍kæriə/ the accent is on the first syllable.
The mark (') on the top of a syllable in a word indicates that the particular syllable is stressed. This is known as primary stress. Primary stress indicates that the syllable is more prominent than the other syllables. There might also be a mark below on a syllable in a word. This is known as secondary stress. This indicates that this particular syllable is the next most prominent syllable. But for our speech purposes primary accent is the most important one.
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Until now we have been cutting up speech into segments, and analysing segmental features. We .are now going to study another set of phonetic features, which do not affect one segment, but long stretches of utterance, such as the syllable, 'the word and the sentence. These features, which are so to speak superimposed on 1 segments, and are known as suprasegmental or prosodic features include accentuation, rhythm and intonation.
PROMINENCE
PROMINENCE
When we speak we give more emphasis to sorne parts of an utterance than t others. We can make a syllable stand out with respect to its neighbouring syllables in a word, and sorne words stand out with respect to the rest of the words in a longer utterance. Let us consider those elements that produce prominence at syllable level: pitch, quality, quantity and stress.
In the past, these terms - particularly stress - were not very strictly defined, in that articulatory and auditory criteria were often confused. When we gave articulatory definitions for consonants and vowels, we did not have much difficulty in feeling and sometimes seeing what was happening · in our vocal tract. That was because we were dealing with fairly accessible articulators. Now, however, owing to the elusive nature of the elements producing prominence, it will be necessary to refer to each of them in terms of how they are produced, and how the listener perceives them.
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