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 last clause allows continued belief in stress timing. What is not made clear is that isochrony is only observable if one allows oneself the twin luxuries of redrawing the criteria for rhythmicality and repeated listenings. There are 48 different isochronous chains in her data, each of which is judged to be isochronous by different rhythmic criteria, and some chains are judged to be isochronous only if one ignores meaning. It would be safer to conclude that English speech is characterised by brief stretches of rhythmic groups, but that it is not isochronous. As preceding scholars have done, CouperKuhlen leaves it open for people to continue to believe in stresstiming. 8 What if English were stress-timed? One question, rarely addressed but productive to consider, concerns what English would be like if it were stress-timed in long stretches. It seems to me that utterances in English would be very difficult to attend to as units of meaning. The stress-timed rhythm would draw attention to itself and distract the listener's attention away from meaningful choices: it would, in other words, be English in oblique orientation (cf. Brazil, 1985). Bolinger commented on this type of speech: It seems only natural that when you're speaking routinely and mechanically, the mechanical phenomenon of even rhythm would assert itself... (1986, p. 47) Bolinger goes on to suggest two reasons why purpose-driven spontaneous speech is not 'routine and mechanical': first he states that 'one thing the adjustment is never allowed to interfere [with] is our meaning' (1986, p. 47) and 'the words we want to emphasize are often irregularly spaced, which means that the number of syllables may be radically different from measure to measure' (1986, p. 47). He concedes that 'stylized intonation' (his example of this is // it's NEver too LATE to MEND //) does have this routine and mechanical feel to it. But 'stylized intonation' is a special case, and is therefore not an appropriate style of spoken discourse on which to base generalisations about everyday purpose-driven speech. He expresses the worry that 'this sort of sing song is just the kind of intonational frame that a classroom drill is apt to fall into' (p. 48), and suggests 45