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

cause of perceptions of rhythmic differences: not speaker behaviour, nor any underlying feature of language. The other two points can be taken together, because they both essentially involve the same kind of activity, the reading aloud of short written utterances. Couper-Kuhlen's work has indicated that stretches of speech as long as 27 syllables may possess isochronicity. The value that language learners get from practising stress-timing exercises is that they are practising the mechanics of producing non prominent syllables between prominences occurring at roughly equal intervals. The material they practice with is (generally) short enough for it to remain natural-sounding. It is only possible to believe in stress-timing if you are happy assuming that it is acceptable to: (a) redraw the criteria for rhythmicality whenever you wish (b) treat speech as a product, and subject it to repeated analyses that ignore meaning (c) regard nursery-rhymes as proto-typical speech. None of these assumptions is acceptable. If patches of stress-timing do occur this is an incidental, patchy effect brought about by fleeting coincidences between time and the occurrence of prominences and word-accents. Speakers time language: language does not time speakers. References Abercrombie, D. (1967). Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bolinger, D. (1986). The English beat: Some notes on rhythm. Studies in Descriptive Linguistics, 15, 36-49. Brazil, D. (1985). The communicative value of intonation in English. English Language Research, University of Birmingham. Brazil, D. (1994). Pronunciation for advanced learners, of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brazil, D. (1995). A grammar of speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, G. (1990). Listening to spoken English. (2nd ed.). Harlow: Longman. Classe, A. (1939). The rhythm of English prose. Oxford: Blackwell. COBUILD (1995). Collins COBUILD English dictionary. London: Harper Collins. 47