Pow Paper

Analysis of the POW site as a possible tool for ELT.

Stephanie Segatto

(Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo – UFES)

INTRODUCTION

  The teaching of prosody and the suprasegmental characteristics related to the speech of a language is not normally considered of great importance, it is not taught in language courses at school nor even at Universities. This article aims to propose an analysis of the POW site (Prosody on the Web) as a possible tool that may help teachers and students of the English language. Besides this, this article contains a brief presentation about what the study of prosody consists of: its meaning and its features. This article will also show, by using examples, how prosody can be useful in our daily life and how to use it properly.

“What is prosody?” This is the first question everybody asks when I say that one of the subjects of my English course is “Prosody”. For most people, prosody is not something that is part of their lives, they do not even know what the meaning of the word prosody is, its importance or its use. How, then, may a meaning be created to explain prosody? To do it in an easy way, when asked about prosody, I answer that it is the study of the melody of speech. But this is just a basic concept. Prosody is a big and crucially important part of the study of a language. Peppé and Maidment (2000), the authors of the site Prosody on the Web (POW) mention that:

The functions of prosody are many and fascinating. Where speech-sounds such as vowels and consonants function mainly to provide an indication of the identity of words and the regional variety of the speaker, prosody can indicate syntax, turn-taking in conversational interactions, types of utterance such as questions and statements, and people's attitudes and feelings. They can also indicate word-identity (although only occasionally, in English). We will treat a few well-defined prosodic functions such as chunking and focus. The forms (or elements) of prosody are derived from the acoustic characteristics of speech. They include the pitch or frequency, the length or duration, and the loudness or intensity. All these forms are present in varying quantities in every spoken utterance. The varying quantities help determine the function to which listeners orient themselves in interpreting the utterance. (PEPPÉ & MAIDMENT, 2000, Introduction, p.1)

The study of speech may well involve many characteristics that are used in a very common way by people, even though they have no idea that they make use of these tools. The main suprasegmental characteristic of speech is intonation. Intonation is crucial for communication. It exists in every language, however, many speakers are more concerned with finding the right words to pass a clear message and because of it, they keep on forgetting that the intonation matters a lot. When talking about intonation, how we say things is more important than what we say. (SABBADINI, 2006) This is something that not only students, but also teachers must worry about. When teaching a language, intonation must be taught. Sometimes, the wrong use of intonation can result in serious misunderstandings. Therefore, in the end, the clear message that was the most important thing will not be passed precisely.

The authors of the book Introducing Phonetic Science point out that:  

There are features of speech that span a number of speech sounds or a number of syllables or even whole utterances. Such features are called suprasegmental or prosodic features. They include lexical and rhythmic stress, lexical tone and intonation. (ASHBY & MAIDMENT, 2005, Introducing Phonetic Science, p.154)  

To understand intonation in a more specific way, it is necessary to know more about the three main prosodic systems in English, which are tonality, tonicity and tone, also known as chunking, focus and pitch. Speakers of English always face these three types of decision while speaking. How to break the material up into chunks or fragments, what to accent and which tone to use.  (WELLS, 2006) Let us now consider each one of these features individually.

CHUNKING (or Tonality)

  This linguistic system can be described as the division of the spoken material into chunks or intonation phrases. When making use of this feature, the speaker may present the material as two, or three, pieces of information rather than as a single piece. (WELLS, 2006) About chunking, Peppé and Maidment (2000), the authors of the site Prosody on the Web (POW) mention that: 

“Chunking prosody can be done in various ways, but the sound of it and its communicative function can be recognized when it shows different meanings of two otherwise identical utterances.”

This can be shown by the example of one exercise we did in class with the phrase “she gave her cat food”. When pronouncing this phrase, if we make a little stop or pause before the word “cat”, the idea will be that “she” gave the other woman cat food. Now if we pause a little before the word “food”, the idea will be that “she” gave food to her cat. In the first reading, the phrase contains two people: a woman that is giving cat food to another. In the second one, however, the phrase contains one person and one cat: a woman that is giving her cat food. In one phrase the word “her” is an objective pronoun. In the other, “her” is considered a possessive adjective. These crucial differences show how important chunking can be.

While doing the exercises in the POW site, I personally did not find much difficulty regarding the exercises of this point. But one that has called my attention was the exercise from page 2. In those exercises, it is possible to see that the meaning changes because of the pause that exists between the words. The exercise consists in distinguish the numbers that are presented.  

Based on this idea, the exercise was composed of five audios of a person sometimes saying different numbers and sometimes saying the same number twice and the difference between the numbers are made by chunking.  

I separated two sentences from this exercise to present using the WASP program.

The first one is the sentence: Thirty-two, one. Thirty, two, one.

Analyzing the graph below, it is possible to see the differences between the first two numbers and the other three. If we take a look at the pauses measurements, we will see that there are several differences. When doing this paper, I have made my own measurements and I could see that in the first utterance, the speaker takes 0,719s to say “thirty-two”, which is represented by the first three red lines,  while in the second utterance he takes 1,138s to say “thirty, two”, which is represented by the first three red lines of the second utterance. These measurements prove that when there is a longer pause, it means that the two words are separated and are distinct. However, when there is a less long pause, it means that the words are together forming just one meaning.