Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Richard Cauldwell: Stress-timing: observations, beliefs, and evidence

The argument goes that each of the syllables occupies an equal time-frame, as represented in Table 1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 et qui a pour but d'e ta blir l'e li te des sexes Table 1 Syllable-timing Imagine that there are stresses in the syllables 5, 8, 12 and 14: et qui a pour BUT d'étaBLIR 1'égaliTÉ des SEXES The argument goes that the stresses are unisochronous (i.e. are not rhythmic) because the intervening numbers of syllables varies - there are respectively, two, three, and one intervening syllables between these stresses. It is argued that because the syllables take an equal amount of time to say, the stresses occur at non-regular intervals. Now, I have the recording of this extract and I have listened to it repeatedly, but as I am not a native speaker of French I cannot tell where the stresses do in fact occur.

1 What I can do however is to measure the lengths of the syllables in units of seventy-fifths of a second.

2 These measurements are given in the third row of Table 2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 et qui a pour but d'e ta blir l'e ga li té des sexes 10 10 15 18 11 12 15 14 10 10 12 10 08 30 Table 2 Syllable-timing measured Table 2 shows that syllables vary in length between 8 and 30 units: that is from approximately one tenth to four tenths of a second. So the syllables are certainly not 'of the same length

1. When presented like this, it is easy to see why nobody takes syllable-timing very seriously - not even by those who take its twin, stress-timing, seriously. A further indication of its improbability can be obtained if you try to read this so that the syllables have the same length, it will sound extremely unnatural. It is interesting to note with Roach (1982, p. 75 & p. 78) that most research has been conducted by speakers of stress-timed languages. 1 For an excellent discussion on why this might be so cf. Roach (1982). 2 This is because the recording is on CD. 35