1. Suprasegmental Features Overview

• Suprasegmentals are features that apply over phonemes and affect the way sounds are organized and interpreted in speech. They operate above the level of individual segments (consonants, vowels, and words).

• These features include:

  • Stress

  • Intonation

  • Length/Duration

  • Tone

2. Stress

• Definition: Stress refers to the emphasis or prominence placed on a sound, syllable, or word in speech.

• Three Components of Stress:

  • Increased Pitch: Higher tone.

  • Increased Volume: Louder.

  • Longer Duration: Spoken more slowly.

• Types of Stress:

  • Contrastive Stress: At the word level, it alters meaning or intent (e.g., "affect" vs. "effect").

  • Lexical Stress: Inherent stress pattern within a word (e.g., "project" as noun vs. verb).

  • Grammatical Stress: Stress varies depending on the syntactical category (e.g., noun vs. verb pairs).

• Degrees of Stress:

  • Primary Stress: Most prominent stress in a multisyllabic word.

  • Secondary Stress: Lesser prominence than primary, but still noticeable.

  • Tertiary Stress: Weakest stress, often reduced.

• Unstressed Phonemes:

  • Less precision in articulation.

  • Vowels often reduced to schwa /ə/.

  • Some consonants may be omitted or partially devoiced.

• Stress "Rules":

  • Words ending in -er, -or, -ar (e.g., author, brother) have primary stress on the first syllable.

  • Words ending in -le, -al (e.g., circle, journal) typically have primary stress on the first syllable.

  • Suffixes like -ion, -ant, -ent, -ance, -able, -ous usually do not receive primary stress and are pronounced with a schwa /ə/ (e.g., action, mission).

• Stress in Sentences:

  • Content Words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) receive stress.

  • Function Words (articles, prepositions, pronouns) are usually unstressed.

  • Sentence Stress: New information is stressed more than old/given information.

3. Intonation

• Definition: Intonation refers to the melody of speech, where pitch changes occur across a phrase or sentence.

  • Pitch Variants: Rising, falling, or steady.

  • Pitch and Intonation together make up the prosody of speech, reflecting emotional tone and helping distinguish meaning.

• Pitch Changes:

  • Falling Intonation: Typically used at the end of statements or questions with who, what, where, when, why.

  • Rising Intonation: Used in yes/no questions, pauses, and to indicate continuation in speech (e.g., holding the floor in a conversation).

• Phrase Unit: A segment of speech (e.g., a clause or sentence) bounded by pauses, containing a stress unit, and having a distinct pitch pattern.

  • Example of phrase units:

    • (The little boy went to his friend’s house) (before he walked to the store) (to buy himself a candy bar).

4. Length/Duration

• Definition: Length or duration refers to how long speech sounds last and is closely tied to the rhythm and tempo of speech.

• Factors Affecting Duration:

  • Rate: The speed of speech can influence assimilation (blending of sounds).

  • Pauses: Indicate breath groups or pauses between ideas.

• General Duration Rules:

  • Diphthongs > Vowels: Diphthongs are longer than monophthongs.

  • Vowels > Consonants: Vowels typically last longer than consonants.

  • Glides & Liquids > Stops: Glides and liquids (e.g., /j, l, r/) have longer duration than stops (e.g., /p, t, k/).

  • Stressed Syllables > Unstressed Syllables: Stressed syllables have greater duration.

  • Vowels Preceding Voiced Consonants > Voiceless Consonants: Vowels before voiced consonants (e.g., dog) are longer than those before voiceless consonants (e.g., cat).

  • Vowels in Open Syllables > Closed Syllables: Vowels in open syllables (e.g., be) tend to last longer than those in closed syllables (e.g., bat).

5. Tone (not applicable to English)

• Definition: Tone refers to the use of pitch to distinguish meaning between words in languages that use tone.

  • Phonemic differences: Tone languages (like Mandarin) use pitch differences to distinguish words. In English, this is not a feature.

• Languages with Tone:

  • Tone changes can alter the meaning of a word completely.

  • Example: In Mandarin, the word for "mother" /mā/ (high level tone) vs. "hemp" /má/ (rising tone).

6. Stress & Spelling

• Spelling and Stress: Stress can influence how words are spelled, particularly when adding suffixes.

  • Doubling final consonants: When a root word ends in a consonant and the final syllable is stressed, the final consonant is often doubled before adding a suffix (e.g., begin → beginning).