Prosody Suprasegmental Features

You can study English reading, writing and grammar for many years, but when you begin to talk with English speakers from other countries, especially fluent speakers talking together informally, you may be surprised to find that spoken English is very different from written English. The IPA provides a group of symbols for stress, length, intonation, syllabification and tone under the general heading suprasegmentals , reflecting a conceptual division of speech into segmental and suprasegmental parts. However, as we shall see, this division is not very clean, with phonetic correlates of stress, intonation etc. often manifest in the consonants and vowels, i.e. at the segmental level. Speaking English without them —pronouncing each word distinctly and separately, as written—can actually make an English learner less fluent and less easily understood. Understanding these features can be a great help to English learners. Therefore, rather than referring to segmentals vs. suprasegmentals , I prefer the more general term prosody for these phenomena (among others).

Keywords:

Intonation , stress , suprasegmental , Pitch , prosody