RHYTHM

• The notion of rhythm involves some noticeable event

happening at regular intervals of time; one can detect the
rhythm of a heartbeat, of a flashing light or of a piece of
music.

• It has often been claimed that English speech is rhythmical,

and that the rhythm is detectable in the regular occurrence of
stressed syllables.

• Of course, it is not suggested that the timing is as regular as a

clock: the regularity of occurrence is only relative.
STRESS –TIMED RHYTHM
 STRESS –TIMED RHYTHM
• The theory that English has stress-timed rhythm implies that stressed syllables
will tend to occur at relatively regular intervals, whether they are separated
by unstressed syllables or not. an example is given below:

1 2 3 4 5
• ‘Walk ‘down the ‘path to the ‘end of the ca’nal

• This theory states that the times from each stressed syllable to the next tends
to be the same, irrespective of the number of intervening unstressed
syllables.
SYLLABLE –TIMED RHYTHM
 SYLLABLE-TIME RHYTHM
• All syllables, whether stressed or unstressed, tend to occur at regular time
intervals and the time between stressed syllables will be shorter or longer in
proportion to the number of unstressed syllables.

• Some writers have developed theories of English rhythm in which a unit of

rhythm , the foot is used.

• The foot begins with a stressed syllable and includes all following unstressed
syllables up to (not including) the following stressed syllable. The example
sentence given is divided into ‘feet’ as follows:

|‘Walk |‘down the | ‘path to the | ‘end of the ca | ‘nal|

 • Some theories of rhythm go further than this, and point to the fact that some ’feet’
are stronger than others, producing strong-weak patterns in large pieces of
speech above the level of the foot. To understand how this could be done, let’s
start with a simple example, the sentence “twenty places further back”

Rhythmic Rhythmic
structure structure
s w s w
twen ty pla ces
The word ‘twenty’ has one strong (s) The word ‘places’ has the same form
and one weak (w) syllable, forming as well.
one foot.
• Now consider the phrase’twenty places’, ‘where ‘places’ normally carries
stronger stress than ‘twenty’(rhythmically stronger). We can make a “tree
diagram” grow to look like this:

w
s

s w s w
twen ty pla ces
 • If we then look at this phrase in the
context of a longer phrase, ‘twenty
places further back’ and build up the
‘further back’ part in a similar way. We
would end up with a more elaborate
structure:

w
s

w s w s

s s w
twen ty pla ces s w s
fur ther back
• By analysing speech in this way we are able to show the relationships
between strong and weak elements, and the different levels of stress that we
find.
• The strength of any particular syllable can be measured by counting up the
number f times an ‘s’ symbol occurs above it. The levels in the sentence
shown previously can be diagrammed like this(leaving out syllables that
have never received stress at any level)
s
s s s
S s s s
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twen ty pla ces fur ther back
• The metrical grid may be correct for slow speech, but, we must now
look at what happens to the rhythm in normal speech: many English
speakers would feel that, although in ‘twenty places’ the right-hand
foot is stronger, the word ‘twenty’ is stronger than ‘places’ in ‘ twenty
places further back’ when spoken in a conversational style.
• It is widely claimed that English speech tends towards a regular
alternation between stronger and weaker, and tends to adjust stress
levels to bring this about.
• The effect is particularly noticeable in cases such as the following,
which all show the effect of what is called stressed-shift.

• Compact(adjective) = /kəmˈpækt/ vs / ˈ kɒm.pækt ˈdɪsk/

• In brief, it seems that stresses are altered according to context.