July

Well, here we are in July. Who’d have thought, eh? At ETC International, we are passionate about language and although we don’t promote any particular model, we like to make sure we inform learners of the possibilities English has to offer. Last week, I asked you to say the sentence, “What are you doing tonight?” and place the stress on different words each time to see how it changes the meaning. Before we focus on this, I’d like to consider how a speaker actually identifies the stressed words in an utterance.

In the video, you probably realised it was through their rise of ‘pitch’. The stressed word was pitched higher than the others in order to identify it. Actually, it’s often a combination of ‘pitch’, ‘loudness’, ‘length’, and ‘quality of the sound’ but mainly it’s the ‘pitch’, which usually rises. This is not true for everyone, however, as sometimes the pitch falls. It’s quite difficult to identify the stress on a word without changing the pitch, although singers can do it! As a church chorister as a child, I was taught how to do it when chanting psalms!

For an experiment, try saying 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6,  and stress number 4 by just altering the length or loudness, without changing the pitch.

Next week we’ll get back to the sentence from last week. Here’s the advert again, just to remind you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbTFePdJ3eE

Stay well!