Seattle Learning Academy - 20 The Rythm Rule and Sentence Stress | Текст песни

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#20: The American English Pronunciation Rhythm Rule and Sentence Stress

Learn the basics behind sentence stress and the Rhythm Rule.
Transcript

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation podcast. My name is Mandy, and this is podcast number 20. Today's podcast is exciting for a number of reasons.

First, I am looking for input from all of you. I am planning to start adding supplemental podcasts in addition to these regular ones that are language specific. I know I am going to do one for Japanese speakers first and Spanish speakers second, because many of our listeners come from Japan as well as Spanish speaking countries. After that I will go down the list of what I can guess other listeners speak, based on the country you are listening from. If you're listening from the United States, I have no idea what your first language is. I can't get that information through my podcast tracking software. I need you to tell me.

In addition, I am wondering what your language's specific problems are. Send me a quick email and tell me what language you speak as well as what sounds or aspects of pronunciation you find the most troublesome. The more I hear from a language group, the more likely it is that I will do a special podcast for your language, and the more specific I can get with resources to help you.

The second reason that this is an exciting podcast is because it is first in a set of podcasts about sentence stress and the rhythm of spoken English. It is a bit too detailed to be able to cover all in one podcast, so I'm going to spend 2 or 3 weeks on it.

I've talked about the rhythm of English before during the podcasts on contractions and reduced pronouns. Those were episodes number 12, 13, and 16. But this podcast finally gets into some specifics about how to deal with sentence stress.

Think about sentence stress as simply saying the most important words of a sentence at a different pitch, or a little bit louder, or for a little bit longer than the other words of the sentence.

It isn't surprising that the most important words (we'll call them content words) are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs. Those are the words that help us form a picture in our head; they give us the contents of our story. We want our listener to be able to quickly grasp the main content of our story, so we make the content words easier to hear by bringing attention to them.

The other words (we'll call them function words) are the words we use to make our sentences grammatically correct. Function words are words like pronouns, determiners, and prepositions. If our function words were missing or used incorrectly, we would be considered poor speakers of English, but our listener would probably still get the main idea of what we're saying. Since function words don't give us the main information, we don't usually want or need to do anything to give them added attention. In fact, sometimes we do things to deliberately push them into the background.

I'll have a chart with the transcripts to this show that gives examples of content and function words.
Content Words
Category Description Examples
nouns people, places, things, and ideas Patty, Seattle, cars, happiness
main verbs verbs without auxiliaries ran, swims, thinking
adjectives words that describe nouns red, soft, careful
adverbs (except adverbs of frequency) words that describe verbs calmly, quickly, carefully
negatives words that negate not, never

Function Words
Category Description Examples
auxiliary verbs a form of the words to be or to have or modals are, was, has, could, should
prepositions words that tell relation to other words at, on, to, near
conjunctions words that tie clauses together and, so, but, however
determiners words that give detail to nouns a, an, the, some, any
pronouns words that replace nouns I, it, we, they, he, she



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