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

Some indication of the problems of measuring rhythm are illustrated by Halliday. He states: ...the provisional finding is that

, on the average, in spontaneous conversation carried on at a constant speed, a two-syllable foot will be about one fifth as long again as a one-syllable foot (i.e. slightly longer, but nothing like twice as long..-.(1994, p. 293) He then presents the following series of relationships between numbers of syllables and duration: no. of syllables in foot 1 2 3 4 relative duration of feet 1 1.2 1.4 1.5 Table 3 Relative duration of feet with increasing numbers of syllables The first row in Table 3 shows increasing numbers of syllables in the foot; the second row gives the proportions of time that each foot would be likely to take. Thus a foot with four syllables will last half as long again (1.5) as a foot with one syllable (1). The implication is that in the following utterance (imagine it is spoken by a considerate boss to an employee who is ill and has been told to go home) Sleep well and don't come to work tomorrow the timing would be likely to be words Sleep well and don 't come to work tomorrow syllables 1 2 3 4 timing 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.75 Table 4 relative duration of feet in a fabricated utterance Table 4 indicates that sleep would last half a second, well and would last one tenth of a second longer, and so on.

3 Note that the last foot, with four syllables, is predicted to last half as long again as the first syllable. The very fact that proponents of stress-timing accept that the duration of feet, and therefore the distance (in time) between stresses is variable calls into question the notion of stress-timing. In particular the issue arises of whether the difference of 50% duration between the first and fourth feet in the above example is noticeable 3 Remember this is a fabricated utterance, with imagined timings given in tenths of a second. 40