Rhythmic Alternation and Stress Clash A Phonological Study of Erei-English Speakers.pdf

Different rhythms and timings occur in all the languages in the world. While some languages exhibit stress-timed rhythm, others exhibit syllable-timed rhythm. Like many other languages, English observes stress-timed rhythm where there is alternation of strong and weak syllables. Other languages like Erei display syllable-timed rhythm; there is no alternation of strong and weak syllables: all syllables and/or vowels are rendered with equal energy. The study, therefore, investigated the rhythmic alternation and stress clash in the speech outputs of Erei-English speakers in Biase Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. Utterances of eight subjects – four males and four females – were recorded in order to test their performance in sentence stress placement. A British native speaker was also recorded to serve as control. Three sentences were used for the analysis, and the metrical theory was adopted as the framework for the study. Findings reviewed that Erei-English bilinguals transferred the syllable nature of Erei in speaking English, resulting in stress clash. They, like most Nigerian speakers of English, placed strong form in nearly all the vowels or syllables, and did not observe alternation rule because of the influence of their first language. The accessibility and availability of communicative devices and the teaching of prosodic features before the individual segments were suggested to enhance intelligibility in the speech of native Erei speakers of UNIUYO Journal of Humanities (UUJH), Vol. 23, No. 1, May 2019 34 English in Nigeria. Keywords: Erei-English speakers, Intelligibility, Rhythmic alternation, Stress clash, Suprasegmentals Introduction One can study English reading, writing and grammar for many years, but when one begins to interact with English speakers, especially fluent native speakers, one might be surprised to find out that the requirements for spoken English are in some ways distinct from those of written English. This is because several important features of spoken English such as stress, rhythm and intonation are not apparent in the written language. These features make up the unique music of English. In his observation, for example, Ladefoged (2006) points out that in spoken English, especially in connected speech, some smaller or grammatical words like “and, to, and him may be considerably altered... will completely be unstressed, the vowel may be reduced to [ ə ] or may disappear altogether, and one or more consonants may be dropped or altered” (p. 107). In the study of phonological description, two broad areas are usually considered: the segmental phonology and the suprasegmental (also known as nonsegmental or prosodic) phonology. The segmental phonology is primarily concerned with the description and analysis of the individual sound segments: the vowels and the consonants; whereas the suprasegmental phonology describes and accounts for sounds above the individual segments. That is, it centres on more than one segment, considering them as a unit. The study of word stress, rhythm (sentence stress) as well as intonation is the main primary concern of the suprasegmental features: two or more segments are looked upon at the same time. Many researchers (Cunningham & Mary, 1998; Onose, 2010; Busá, 2012; Ukam, 2015) have argued independently that of the two areas of phonological analysis, the suprasegmental phonology remains the area that has been mostly neglected, especially in a second language situation when the study of phonology comes up for discussion. The area of segmental phonology receives greater attention than the suprasegmental phonology in a phonological teaching class. Busá (2012) laments that “prosody has traditionally been given little relevance in pronunciation classes, which, instead, have focused on the discrimination and articulation of sounds through drills, minimal pair exercises” (p. 101). It would never be argued that curriculum designers have always placed the study of segmental features first before the suprasegments whenever the teaching of phonology comes up. And most textbooks also spend much time in the treatment of the segmental features and less time in the treatment of the Rhythmic Alternation and Stress Clash...