Chunks 'n' Pronunciation

Jonathan Marks, Poland

Jonathan Marks is the author of English Pronunciation in Use Elementary (CUP 2007). Jonathan and Tim Bowen have recently published The Book of Pronunciation with DELTA Publishing. E-mail: jonathanmarks@wp.pl

In written English, there are gaps between all the words; there are also punctuation marks, such as commas, semi-colons and full stops. These features help you to see how a text is constructed, what belongs with what, and how you need to divide the sequences of letters and words up in order to process it successfully. In spoken English, on the other hand, therearentanygapsbetweenmostofthewords - oranypunctuationmarkseither. We tend not to notice this, because we're expert listeners to English and we're highly skilled in deluding ourselves that the things we hear when we hear English are the same as the things we see when we look at a written text. But try listening to a stretch of fluent speech in a language you don't know at all, and see if you can spot where the words begin and end.

The 'stream of speech' is a commonly-used metaphor, and an apt one insofar as stretches of fluent (= flowing) speech are continuous rather than segmented; if you look at a stream or a river flowing, you can't see the joins. But of course there are breaks in speech; we have to pause, for two speaker-related reasons: to draw breath and to at least begin to decide what we're going to say next (although there are people who don't bother much about the latter!) and for one listener-related reason: to give listeners at least half a chance to take in what we've just finished saying, before we plough on with what comes next.

Even in a stretch of speech where there are no actual silent pauses, though, there's an impression of bundling and rhythmicality, peaks and troughs of energy, which is unlike the undifferentiated flow of a river and perhaps more like a succession of waves breaking on a shore. Some words, or at least some syllables, stand out clearly, while others seem mumbled and indistinct. Sometimes, for a short while, there's even a perceptible, regular rhythmic beat being drummed out by the stand-out syllables.

The bundles of speech are what I'll call tone units (though various alternatives terms have also been used) and the rhythmicality, the peaks and troughs, are the result of differentiation between prominent syllables, which are articulated with full vowel quality and which carry intonation choices, and non-prominent syllables, which tend to have reduced vowel quality and less pitch variation, and which are subject to speeding-up, compression, elision and loss of identity.

Tone units come in various shapes and sizes, but typically they have either one or two prominent syllables. A single syllable, if spoken in isolation, constitutes a tone unit:

// TWO //

So does a single multisyllabic word:

// TUESday //

// alTERnative //

This model of intonation and the typographical conventions associated with it are taken from Brazil (1994). Tone unit boundaries are marked thus: //. Prominent syllables are capitalised (and nothing else is capitalised) and underlining indicates tonic prominences; these are the syllables where tones - usually fall, fall-rise or rise - are initiated; if there are syllables after the tonic prominence, eg '-day' in 'Tuesday' or '-native' in 'alternative', the falling or rising tone tends to be continued through these.

Here are some longer tone units:

// ONly TWO //

// there were ONly TWO //

// there were ONly TWO of them //

// there were only TWO LEFT //

// there were only TWO of them LEFT //

// TUESday afterNOON //

// it's on TUESday afterNOON //

// there's NO alTERnative //

// it's the ONly alTERnative //

// an alTERnative soLUtion //

// to FIND an alternative soLUtion //

The non-tonic prominences (capitalised but not underlined) establish the 'key' of the tone unit, i.e. its overall pitch level, but don't carry falling or rising tones.

In a sequence of tone units, such as this:

// it'll HAVE to be TUESday // TUESday afterNOON // there's NO alTERnative // IS there //

there may or may not be silent pauses between the tone units; it depends whether the speaker needs to take in breath or take time out to formulate what they want to say, or wants to pause for dramatic effect. Pausing also happens inside tone units, for the same reasons, but the end of a tone unit is particularly 'good' time to pause.

A fluent succession of tone units with similar rhythmic structure gives rise to the preception of what's called 'stress-timing': the impression that prominent syllables ('stresses') occur at equal intervals. This happens because the more intervening non-prominent syllables there are, the more they tend to get squashed and the shorter the time they tend to occupy. It's quite possible, for example, for sequences of non-prominent syllables such as 'to be', '-day after-' and 'al-' to occupy roughly equal lengths of time, even though they consist of 2, 3 and 1 syllable respectively:

Sometimes you can even see people underlining this regularity with nods and hand movements. But it's still only an approximation, a tendency, and it only happens through very short stretches of speech. If you want to hear what stress-timing really sounds like, you have to listen to the recitation of verse with a regular beat:

People obviously don't speak English like this most of the time; if they wanted to do so, they'd need to script and rehearse everything they wanted to say. For more about this, including some thoughts about why the mirage of 'stress-timing' is so beguiling, see Marks (1999).

Now, if ... you ... are ... learning ... English ... and ... you ... can ... only ... speak ... it ... at ... this ... speed, you probably wish you could speak it faster, don't you? Right. But what does 'faster' mean? The answer might be different for other languages, but for English, at least, it doesn't mean being an express train that travels long distances at high speed, but rather being an efficient modern commuter train, that stops at lots of stations with short distances between them, but has good acceleration and braking, so it can travel pretty fast between the stations. In other words you should work on producing tone units with the right kind of shape: differentiation between prominent and non-prominent syllables, with the prominent ones uttered loud and clear, and the non-prominent ones muttered and scrunched together, and you should only stop at stations, unless you get an unexpected red signal between stations for some reason.

You're probably wondering, by now, what all this has got to do with 'chunks' of language. Well, the thing is ... a lot of chunks - and when I say a lot, I mean a really lot - comprise a single tone unit and are typically produced with a one of a limited number of rhythmic patterns. Here's one very common pattern, with just a few example chunks:

... and so on,

This doesn't mean that these chunks are always, necessarily, said like this, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that this is their characteristic guise. So when people learn these chunks, maybe it'd be useful for them to learn them with this rhythm, because:

1. it's a characteristic property of their chunkhood;
2. the rhythm will enhance their memorability;
3. it'll help them to internalise a common tone-unit shape which they can also use in producing other utterances, such as:

4. it'll help them to internalise fundamental principles of English pronunciation such as differentiation between prominent and non-prominent syllables, vowel reduction, compression and elision, and the relative importance of attending to vowel quality in prominent syllables.

So far the focus has been on rhythm as one feature of spoken English which is instantiated particularly noticeably in lexical chunks. The examples 'tip of my tongue' and 'nearest and dearest' in the table above also illustrate two other recurrent features of lexical chunks: alliteration and rhyme.

Here are just a few more examples of alliterative chunks:

it's now or never
your best bet
tried and tested
bread and butter
the more, the merrier
where there's a will, there's a way
come to a conclusion
spick and span

... and rhyming chunks:

snail mail
dream team
pie in the sky
go with the flow
claim to fame
take a break
jet set
down town

Have you ever come across this saying:

"When your head's in the west, you sleep the best;
when your head's in the east, you sleep the least."

?

Well, I don't know if there's any truth in it, but I don't think anyone would say such a thing if it wasn't for the rhythm and the rhyme. It just so happens, in English, that 'west' rhymes with 'best'; what if 'west' rhymed with a word meaning 'appallingly'? And the second part of the saying would logically be "When your head's in the east, you sleep the worst", but it just so happens that 'least' is available to rhyme with 'east'. I suspect this saying is an example of sound predominating over meaning. Other, even more obvious, examples include 'kith and kin' and 'spick and span'; the original meanings of these four adjectives has evaporated (except 'kin', to some extent) and the only remaining raison d'être of these chunks is their alliterative quality.

Now, what about those falling and rising tones that I mentioned near the beginning of this article? Generally speaking, tone choices depend on things like information structure and the way speakers preceive and manipulate discourse conditions. But there are also chunks of language that tend to carry their own ready-made intonation round with them. In order to convey its idiomatic meaning "I agree strongly", the expression "you can say that again" seems to need this intonation:

// you can SAY THAT again //

with either a fall or a fall-rise starting on 'that'.

If it's said like this:

// you can SAY that aGAIN //

the literal meaning seems to compete with the idiomatic one.

"You must be joking" is generally either:

// you must be JOking // or:

// you MUST be JOking //

- in either case with a falling tone starting on 'jo-'. Try saying it with a rising tone and hear how odd it sounds.

"If I were you ...", sentence-initially, is usually:

// if I were you // or:

// if I were YOU //

- with a fall-rise starting on 'I' or 'you' respectively. If the conditional clause is put after the main clause, a straight rise is typically used in preference to a fall-rise.

Chunks of the type "The thing is ...", "The main thing is ...", "The point is ...", "The problem is ...", "The snag is ...", "The funny thing was ...", when used to preface an utterance, characteristically have tonic prominence on 'is/was', and a fall-rise tone:

// the THING IS //

// the FUNNy thing WAS //

etc.

Attention to all these aspects of the pronunciation of chunks has benefits for fluency, rhythm, pausing and so-called 'connected speech' features: elision, assimilation, weak forms, contractions. At the same time, it helps to make chunks more memorable and easier to recall. Even for learners who don't aspire to anything approaching native-like pronunciation, there are benefits for listening skills: identifying chunks and their constituent words even from flimsy phonetic evidence.

Generally, though, I think learners appreciate some work on these aspects and feel that, as a result, they become empowered to speak with more pleasure and confidence - not surprising because, after all,

References

Brazil, D., (1994). Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English. CUP

Marks, J., (1999). 'Is stress-timing real?’ in: ELT Journal 53/3

You can find some examples of exercises that focus on pronunciation aspects of chunks in:

Lindstromberg, S. and F. Boers, (2008). Teaching Chunks of Language. Helbling

Marks, J. and T. Bowen, (2012). The Book of Pronunciation. Delta Publishing

For much more about what spoken English sounds like, see:

Cauldwell, R., (2013). Phonology for Listening. Speech in Action.

Field, J., (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. CUP

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and English course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the English for Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.