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

we run the serious risk of confusing students. If we tell them that English is stress-timed and the speech they hear is manifestly not so, then they are going to worry that their ability to learn is deficient because they cannot hear what their teachers tell them they ought to hear. They will thus be disabled from learning to be good listeners. 4 The tradition of belief The first person in the twentieth century to put forward the stresstiming hypothesis was Daniel Jones who wrote in 1918 that for English there 'is a strong tendency in connected speech to make stressed syllables follow each other as nearly as possible at equal distances' (1972, p. 237). One of the first to test this hypothesis was Classe (1939). Couper-Kuhlen (1993) reports that 'the results he[Classe] obtained showed strict isochrony only under very special conditions: the rhythmic groups had to have a similar number of syllables with similar phonetic structure and similar grammatical structure in order to be isochronous in any strict sense (1993, p. 11). Couper-Kuhlen quotes Classe's conclusion: a series of nearly isochronous groups must be rare in English prose, as it may only occur through a complicated system of coincidences. If the necessary conditions have been consciously fulfilled by the writer, we are very near to verse. From the very nature of speech, it is obvious that, in the normal course of events, all the necessary conditions will generally not be present at the same time (1939, p. 85-86) The last sentence amounts to a refutation of the stress-timing hypothesis. Despite this Classe equivocates sufficiently to hold out a lifeline for those who wished still to cling to the belief that English is stress-timed. Isochrony is still .. .a characteristic which always seems to be present and to make its influence felt; although frequently, it only remains as an underlying tendency of which some other factor at times almost completely obliterates the effects (1939, p. 90) The choice of those following Classe has been to grasp at the prostress-timing side of the equivocation rather than the natural consequence of the results. The equivocation allowed others to 37