English Rhythm Essay

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English rhythm. Two tendencies of rhythmic groups’ division. Linguists sometimes consider rhythm as one of the components of intonation. Rhythm is the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. In speech, the type of rhythm depends on the language. Linguists divide languages into two groups: syllable-timed like French, Spanish and other Romance languages and stress-timed languages, such as Germanic languages English and German, as well as Russian. In a syllable-timed language the speaker gives an approximately equal amount of time to each syllable, whether the syllable is stressed or unstressed and this produces the effect of even rather staccato rhythm. In a stress-timed language, of which English is a good example, the rhythm is based on a larger unit than syllable. Though the amount of time given on each syllable varies considerably, the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit is practically unchanged. The stressed syllables of a rhythmic unit form peaks of prominence. They tend to be pronounced at regular intervals no matter how many unstressed syllables are located between every two stressed ones. Thus the distribution of time within the rhythmic unit is unequal. The regularity is provided by the strong "beats". We should like to mention here that speech rhythm has the immediate influence on vowel reduction and elision. Form words such as prepositions, conjunctions as well as auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns are usually unstressed and pronounced in their weak forms with reduced or even elided vowels to secure equal intervals between the stressed syllables, e.g. Speech rhythm is traditionally defined as recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in a speech continuum. We also find a more detailed definition of speech rhythm as the regular alternation of acceleration and
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