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Isochrony

May 03, 2023

Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech.[1]

Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated:[2]

  1. The duration of every syllable is equal (syllable-timed);
  2. The duration of every mora is equal (mora-timed).
  3. The interval between two stressed syllables is equal (stress-timed).

The idea was first expressed thus by Kenneth L. Pike in 1945,[3] though the concept of language naturally occurring in chronologically and rhythmically equal measures is found at least as early as 1775 (in Prosodia Rationalis). This has implications for linguistic typology: D. Abercrombie claimed "As far as is known, every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other ... French, Telugu and Yoruba ... are syllable-timed languages, ... English, Russian and Arabic ... are stress-timed languages."[4] While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing, empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types, calling into question the validity of these types.[5][6][7][8] However, when viewed as a matter of degree, relative differences in the variability of syllable duration across languages have been found.[9]

Syllable timing

In a syllable-timed language, every syllable is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time, though the absolute length of time depends on the prosody. Syllable-timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal prominence and generally lack reduced vowels.

French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Icelandic, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese,[10] Georgian,[11] Armenian,[12] Turkish and Korean[13] are commonly quoted as examples of syllable-timed languages. This type of rhythm was originally metaphorically referred to as "machine-gun rhythm" because each underlying rhythmical unit is of the same duration, similar to the transient bullet noise of a machine-gun.[14]

Since the 1950s, speech scientists have tried to show the existence of equal syllable durations in the acoustic speech signal without success. More recent research claims that the duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals is responsible for syllable-timed perception.[15]

Mora timing

Some languages like Japanese, Gilbertese, Slovak and Ganda also have regular pacing but are mora-timed, rather than syllable-timed.[16] In Japanese, a V or CV syllable takes up one timing unit. Japanese does not have diphthongs but double vowels, so CVV takes twice the time as CV. A final /N/ also takes as much time as a CV syllable and, at least in poetry, so does the extra length of a geminate consonant. However, colloquial language is less settled than poetic language, and the rhythm may vary from one region to another or with time.

Ancient Greek[17] and Vedic Sanskrit[18] were also strictly mora-timed.

Stress timing

See also: Stress and vowel reduction in English
An American English speaker narrating this section. Listen for his stress timing.

In a stress-timed language, syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables. Consequently, unstressed syllables between stressed syllables tend to be compressed to fit into the time interval: if two stressed syllables are separated by a single unstressed syllable, as in delicious tea, the unstressed syllable will be relatively long, while if a larger number of unstressed syllables intervenes, as in tolerable tea, the unstressed syllables will be shorter.[19]

Stress-timing is sometimes called Morse-code rhythm, but any resemblance between the two is only superficial. Stress-timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes.[20][21] English, Thai, Lao, German, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Catalan, Norwegian, Faroese, Dutch, European Portuguese,[22][23] and Persian are typical stress-timed languages.[24] Some stress-timed languages retain unreduced vowels.[25]

Degrees of durational variability

Despite the relative simplicity of the classifications above, in the real world languages do not fit quite so easily into such precise categories. Languages exhibit degrees of durational variability both in relation to other languages and to other standards of the same language.[26]

There can be varying degrees of stress-timing within the various standards of a language. Some southern dialects of Italian, a syllable-timed language, are effectively stress-timed.[27] English, a stress-timed language, has become so widespread that some standards tend to be more syllable-timed than the British or North American standards, an effect which comes from the influence of other languages spoken in the relevant region. Indian English, for example, tends toward syllable-timing.[28] This does not necessarily mean the language standard itself is to be classified as syllable-timed, of course, but rather that this feature is more pronounced. A subtle example is that to a native English speaker, for example, some accents from Wales may sound more syllable-timed.

A better-documented case of these varying degrees of stress-timing in a language comes from Portuguese. European Portuguese is more stress-timed than the Brazilian standard. The latter has mixed characteristics[29] and varies according to speech rate, sex and dialect. At fast speech rates, Brazilian Portuguese is more stress-timed, while in slow speech rates, it can be more syllable-timed. The accents of rural, southern Rio Grande do Sul and the Northeast (especially Bahia) are considered to sound more syllable-timed than the others, while the southeastern dialects such as the mineiro, in central Minas Gerais, the paulistano, of the northern coast and eastern regions of São Paulo, and the fluminense, along Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and eastern Minas Gerais as well the Federal District, are most frequently essentially stress-timed. Also, male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese speak faster than female speakers and speak in a more stress-timed manner.[30]

Linguist Peter Ladefoged has proposed (citing work by Grabe and Low [31]) that, since languages differ from each other in terms of the amount of difference between the durations of vowels in adjacent syllables, it is possible to calculate a Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) from measured vowel durations to quantify the differences. The data show that, for example, Dutch (traditionally classed as a stress-timed language) exhibits a higher PVI than Spanish (traditionally a syllable-timed language).[9]

The stress-timing–syllable-timing distinction as a continuum

Given the lack of solid evidence for a clear-cut categorical distinction between the two rhythmical types, it seems reasonable to suggest instead that all languages (and all their accents) display both types of rhythm to a greater or lesser extent. T. F. Mitchell claimed that there is no language which is totally syllable-timed or totally stress-timed; rather, all languages display both sorts of timing. Languages will, however, differ in which type of timing predominates.[32] This view was developed by Dauer[33][34] in such a way that a metric was provided allowing researchers to place any language on a scale from maximally stress-timed to maximally syllable-timed. Examples of this approach in use are Dimitrova's study of Bulgarian[35] and Olivo's study of the rhythm of Ashanti Twi.[36]

According to Dafydd Gibbon and Briony Williams, Welsh is neither syllable-timed nor stress-timed, as syllable length varies less than in stress-timed languages.[37]

See also

References

  1. ^ Wells, John (2006). English Intonation: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 0-521-68380-7.
  2. ^ Nespor, M., Shukla, M., & Mehler, J. (2011). Stress‐timed vs. syllable‐timed languages. In van Oostendorp et al. (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phonology (pp. 1147-1159). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  3. ^ Pike, Kenneth L. (1945). The Intonation of American English, vol. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. pp. 34–35.
  4. ^ Abercrombie, David (1967). Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh U.P. p. 97.
  5. ^ Mark Liberman (May 5, 2008). "Slicing the syllabic bologna". Language Log.
  6. ^ Mark Liberman (May 6, 2008). "Another slice of prosodic sausage". Language Log.
  7. ^ Antonio Pamies Bertrán. "Prosodic Typology: On the Dichotomy between Stress-Timed and Syllable-Timed Languages" (PDF).
  8. ^ Roach, Peter (1982) 'On the distinction between "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed languages", in David Crystal (ed) Linguistic Controversies, Arnold, pp 73–9, http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/frp.pdf
  9. ^ a b Ladefoged, Peter (2006). A Course in Phonetics (5th ed.). Thomson. pp. 245–247. ISBN 9781413006889.
  10. ^ Mok, Peggy (2009). "On the syllable-timing of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin" (PDF). Chinese Journal of Phonetics. 2: 148–154.
  11. ^ George Keretchashvili (May 5, 2008). "Recording in Georgian at Omniglot".
  12. ^ Mirakyan, Norayr (2016). "The Implications of Prosodic Differences Between English and Armenian" (PDF). Collection of Scientific Articles of YSU SSS. YSU Press. 1.3 (13): 91–96.
  13. ^ Mok, Peggy; Lee, Sang Im (2008). "Korean speech rhythm using rhythmic measures" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  14. ^ "Research on linguistic rhythm". unito.it. LFSAG. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  15. ^ Harris, Joseph. "Quantifying Speech Rhythms: Perception and Production Data in the Case of Spanish, Portuguese, and English". escholarship.org/. University of California. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  16. ^ Clark John, Yallop Collin, Fletcher Janet (2007). Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. (pp)340.
  17. ^ The Inflectional Accent in Indo-European. Paul Kiparsky. Language. Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 794–849. Linguistic Society of America.
  18. ^ Brown, Charles Phillip (1869). Sanskrit Prosody and Numerical Symbols Explained. Trübner & Company.
  19. ^ Collins, B.; Mees, I. (2013) [First published 2003]. Practical Phonetics and Phonology: A Resource Book for Students (3rd ed.). Routledge. pp. 135–138. ISBN 978-0-415-50650-2.
  20. ^ Gimson, A.C. (1989), An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (4th ed.), London: Edward Arnold
  21. ^ Kohler, K.J. (1995), Einführung in die Phonetik des Deutschen (in German) (2nd ed.), Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag
  22. ^ Azevedo, Milton Mariano. 2005. Portuguese: a linguistic introduction. P.54
  23. ^ Silva, David James. 1994. The Variable Elision of Unstressed Vowels in European Portuguese: A Case Study 2012-03-10 at the Wayback Machine
  24. ^ Grabe, Esther, "Variation Adds to Prosodic Typology", B.Bel and I. Marlin (eds), Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference, 11–13 April 2002, Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage, 127–132. ISBN 2-9518233-0-4. (.doc)
  25. ^ Kenworthy, J. (1987). Teaching English pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  26. ^ [1] 2013-06-15 at the Wayback Machine Durational Variability, Low & Grabe
  27. ^ Grice, M.; D’Imperio, M.; Savino, M.; Avesani, C., 1998. "Strategies for intonation labelling across varieties of Italian" in Hirst, D. ; Di Christo, A., 1998. Intonation Systems. Cambridge University Press.
  28. ^ UTA Working Papers in Linguistics. ed. Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo. P.83
  29. ^ Bisol, leda, PUCRS – O Troqueu Silábico no Sistema Fonológico (Um Adendo ao Artigo de Plínio Barbosa)
  30. ^ Meireles, Alexsandro R.; Tozetti1, João Paulo; Borges, Rogério R.; Speech rate and rhythmic variation in Brazilian Portuguese 2020-01-16 at the Wayback Machine; Phonetics Laboratory, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Speech Prosody Studies Group, Brazil
  31. ^ E. Grabe and E.L. Low (2000) "Durational Variability in Speech and the Rhythm Class Hypothesis", Papers in Laboratory Phonology 7 (The Hague, Mouton)
  32. ^ Mitchell, T. F. (1969), review of Abercrombie (1967), Journal of Linguistics 5, 153–164
  33. ^ Dauer, R. (1983) Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed, Journal of Phonetics 11, 51–62
  34. ^ Dauer, R. (1987) Phonetic and phonological components of rhythm, Proceedings of the XI Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 447–450
  35. ^ Dimitrova, S. (1998) "Bulgarian speech rhythm – Syllable-timed or stress-timed?", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 27, 27–33, http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/sdjipa.htm
  36. ^ Olivo, A. M. (2011) Exploring the speech rhythm continuum: evidence from Ashanti Twi, Journal of Speech Sciences 1(2), 3–15; http://www.journalofspeechsciences.org/index.php/journalofspeechsciences/article/view/27/12 2014-12-27 at the Wayback Machine
  37. ^ Gibbon, D. & Williams, B. (2007). "Timing Patterns in Welsh". In Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) XVI.

External links

  • Roach, Peter (1998). Language Myths, “Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly Than Others”, eds. L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, Penguin, 1998, pp. 150–8
  • Étude sur la discrimination des langues par la prosodie (pdf document) (French)
  • Supra-segmental Phonology (rhythm, intonation and stress-timing)

May 03, 2023
isochrony, postulated, rhythmic, division, time, into, equal, portions, language, rhythm, aspect, prosody, others, being, intonation, stress, tempo, speech, three, alternative, ways, which, language, divide, time, postulated, duration, every, syllable, equal, . Isochrony is the postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language Rhythm is an aspect of prosody others being intonation stress and tempo of speech 1 Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated 2 The duration of every syllable is equal syllable timed The duration of every mora is equal mora timed The interval between two stressed syllables is equal stress timed The idea was first expressed thus by Kenneth L Pike in 1945 3 though the concept of language naturally occurring in chronologically and rhythmically equal measures is found at least as early as 1775 in Prosodia Rationalis This has implications for linguistic typology D Abercrombie claimed As far as is known every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other French Telugu and Yoruba are syllable timed languages English Russian and Arabic are stress timed languages 4 While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types calling into question the validity of these types 5 6 7 8 However when viewed as a matter of degree relative differences in the variability of syllable duration across languages have been found 9 Contents 1 Syllable timing 2 Mora timing 3 Stress timing 4 Degrees of durational variability 5 The stress timing syllable timing distinction as a continuum 6 See also 7 References 8 External linksSyllable timing EditIn a syllable timed language every syllable is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time though the absolute length of time depends on the prosody Syllable timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal prominence and generally lack reduced vowels French Italian Spanish Romanian Brazilian Portuguese Icelandic Cantonese Mandarin Chinese 10 Georgian 11 Armenian 12 Turkish and Korean 13 are commonly quoted as examples of syllable timed languages This type of rhythm was originally metaphorically referred to as machine gun rhythm because each underlying rhythmical unit is of the same duration similar to the transient bullet noise of a machine gun 14 Since the 1950s speech scientists have tried to show the existence of equal syllable durations in the acoustic speech signal without success More recent research claims that the duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals is responsible for syllable timed perception 15 Mora timing EditSome languages like Japanese Gilbertese Slovak and Ganda also have regular pacing but are mora timed rather than syllable timed 16 In Japanese a V or CV syllable takes up one timing unit Japanese does not have diphthongs but double vowels so CVV takes twice the time as CV A final N also takes as much time as a CV syllable and at least in poetry so does the extra length of a geminate consonant However colloquial language is less settled than poetic language and the rhythm may vary from one region to another or with time Ancient Greek 17 and Vedic Sanskrit 18 were also strictly mora timed Stress timing EditSee also Stress and vowel reduction in English source source An American English speaker narrating this section Listen for his stress timing In a stress timed language syllables may last different amounts of time but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time on average between consecutive stressed syllables Consequently unstressed syllables between stressed syllables tend to be compressed to fit into the time interval if two stressed syllables are separated by a single unstressed syllable as in delicious tea the unstressed syllable will be relatively long while if a larger number of unstressed syllables intervenes as in tolerable tea the unstressed syllables will be shorter 19 Stress timing is sometimes called Morse code rhythm but any resemblance between the two is only superficial Stress timing is strongly related to vowel reduction processes 20 21 English Thai Lao German Russian Danish Swedish Catalan Norwegian Faroese Dutch European Portuguese 22 23 and Persian are typical stress timed languages 24 Some stress timed languages retain unreduced vowels 25 Degrees of durational variability EditDespite the relative simplicity of the classifications above in the real world languages do not fit quite so easily into such precise categories Languages exhibit degrees of durational variability both in relation to other languages and to other standards of the same language 26 There can be varying degrees of stress timing within the various standards of a language Some southern dialects of Italian a syllable timed language are effectively stress timed 27 English a stress timed language has become so widespread that some standards tend to be more syllable timed than the British or North American standards an effect which comes from the influence of other languages spoken in the relevant region Indian English for example tends toward syllable timing 28 This does not necessarily mean the language standard itself is to be classified as syllable timed of course but rather that this feature is more pronounced A subtle example is that to a native English speaker for example some accents from Wales may sound more syllable timed A better documented case of these varying degrees of stress timing in a language comes from Portuguese European Portuguese is more stress timed than the Brazilian standard The latter has mixed characteristics 29 and varies according to speech rate sex and dialect At fast speech rates Brazilian Portuguese is more stress timed while in slow speech rates it can be more syllable timed The accents of rural southern Rio Grande do Sul and the Northeast especially Bahia are considered to sound more syllable timed than the others while the southeastern dialects such as the mineiro in central Minas Gerais the paulistano of the northern coast and eastern regions of Sao Paulo and the fluminense along Rio de Janeiro Espirito Santo and eastern Minas Gerais as well the Federal District are most frequently essentially stress timed Also male speakers of Brazilian Portuguese speak faster than female speakers and speak in a more stress timed manner 30 Linguist Peter Ladefoged has proposed citing work by Grabe and Low 31 that since languages differ from each other in terms of the amount of difference between the durations of vowels in adjacent syllables it is possible to calculate a Pairwise Variability Index PVI from measured vowel durations to quantify the differences The data show that for example Dutch traditionally classed as a stress timed language exhibits a higher PVI than Spanish traditionally a syllable timed language 9 The stress timing syllable timing distinction as a continuum EditGiven the lack of solid evidence for a clear cut categorical distinction between the two rhythmical types it seems reasonable to suggest instead that all languages and all their accents display both types of rhythm to a greater or lesser extent T F Mitchell claimed that there is no language which is totally syllable timed or totally stress timed rather all languages display both sorts of timing Languages will however differ in which type of timing predominates 32 This view was developed by Dauer 33 34 in such a way that a metric was provided allowing researchers to place any language on a scale from maximally stress timed to maximally syllable timed Examples of this approach in use are Dimitrova s study of Bulgarian 35 and Olivo s study of the rhythm of Ashanti Twi 36 According to Dafydd Gibbon and Briony Williams Welsh is neither syllable timed nor stress timed as syllable length varies less than in stress timed languages 37 See also EditStress and vowel reduction in EnglishReferences Edit Wells John 2006 English Intonation An Introduction Cambridge University Press p 3 ISBN 0 521 68380 7 Nespor M Shukla M amp Mehler J 2011 Stress timed vs syllable timed languages In van Oostendorp et al Eds The Blackwell Companion to Phonology pp 1147 1159 Malden MA Blackwell Pike Kenneth L 1945 The Intonation of American English vol 1 Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press pp 34 35 Abercrombie David 1967 Elements of General Phonetics Edinburgh U P p 97 Mark Liberman May 5 2008 Slicing the syllabic bologna Language Log Mark Liberman May 6 2008 Another slice of prosodic sausage Language Log Antonio Pamies Bertran Prosodic Typology On the Dichotomy between Stress Timed and Syllable Timed Languages PDF Roach Peter 1982 On the distinction between stress timed and syllable timed languages in David Crystal ed Linguistic Controversies Arnold pp 73 9 http www personal reading ac uk llsroach phon2 frp pdf a b Ladefoged Peter 2006 A Course in Phonetics 5th ed Thomson pp 245 247 ISBN 9781413006889 Mok Peggy 2009 On the syllable timing of Cantonese and Beijing Mandarin PDF Chinese Journal of Phonetics 2 148 154 George Keretchashvili May 5 2008 Recording in Georgian at Omniglot Mirakyan Norayr 2016 The Implications of Prosodic Differences Between English and Armenian PDF Collection of Scientific Articles of YSU SSS YSU Press 1 3 13 91 96 Mok Peggy Lee Sang Im 2008 Korean speech rhythm using rhythmic measures PDF a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Research on linguistic rhythm unito it LFSAG Retrieved 24 August 2019 Harris Joseph Quantifying Speech Rhythms Perception and Production Data in the Case of Spanish Portuguese and English escholarship org University of California Retrieved 24 August 2019 Clark John Yallop Collin Fletcher Janet 2007 Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology Oxford Blackwell pp pp 340 The Inflectional Accent in Indo European Paul Kiparsky Language Vol 49 No 4 Dec 1973 pp 794 849 Linguistic Society of America Brown Charles Phillip 1869 Sanskrit Prosody and Numerical Symbols Explained Trubner amp Company Collins B Mees I 2013 First published 2003 Practical Phonetics and Phonology A Resource Book for Students 3rd ed Routledge pp 135 138 ISBN 978 0 415 50650 2 Gimson A C 1989 An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English 4th ed London Edward Arnold Kohler K J 1995 Einfuhrung in die Phonetik des Deutschen in German 2nd ed Berlin Erich Schmidt Verlag Azevedo Milton Mariano 2005 Portuguese a linguistic introduction P 54 Silva David James 1994 The Variable Elision of Unstressed Vowels in European Portuguese A Case Study Archived 2012 03 10 at the Wayback Machine Grabe Esther Variation Adds to Prosodic Typology B Bel and I Marlin eds Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference 11 13 April 2002 Aix en Provence Laboratoire Parole et Langage 127 132 ISBN 2 9518233 0 4 doc Kenworthy J 1987 Teaching English pronunciation Oxford Oxford University Press 1 Archived 2013 06 15 at the Wayback Machine Durational Variability Low amp Grabe Grice M D Imperio M Savino M Avesani C 1998 Strategies for intonation labelling across varieties of Italian in Hirst D Di Christo A 1998 Intonation Systems Cambridge University Press UTA Working Papers in Linguistics ed Susan C Herring and John C Paolillo P 83 Bisol leda PUCRS O Troqueu Silabico no Sistema Fonologico Um Adendo ao Artigo de Plinio Barbosa Meireles Alexsandro R Tozetti1 Joao Paulo Borges Rogerio R Speech rate and rhythmic variation in Brazilian Portuguese Archived 2020 01 16 at the Wayback Machine Phonetics Laboratory Federal University of Espirito Santo Speech Prosody Studies Group Brazil E Grabe and E L Low 2000 Durational Variability in Speech and the Rhythm Class Hypothesis Papers in Laboratory Phonology 7 The Hague Mouton Mitchell T F 1969 review of Abercrombie 1967 Journal of Linguistics 5 153 164 Dauer R 1983 Stress timing and syllable timing reanalyzed Journal of Phonetics 11 51 62 Dauer R 1987 Phonetic and phonological components of rhythm Proceedings of the XI Congress of Phonetic Sciences 447 450 Dimitrova S 1998 Bulgarian speech rhythm Syllable timed or stress timed Journal of the International Phonetic Association 27 27 33 http www personal reading ac uk llsroach phon2 sdjipa htm Olivo A M 2011 Exploring the speech rhythm continuum evidence from Ashanti Twi Journal of Speech Sciences 1 2 3 15 http www journalofspeechsciences org index php journalofspeechsciences article view 27 12 Archived 2014 12 27 at the Wayback Machine Gibbon D amp Williams B 2007 Timing Patterns in Welsh In Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences ICPhS XVI External links EditRoach Peter 1998 Language Myths Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly Than Others eds L Bauer and P Trudgill Penguin 1998 pp 150 8 Etude sur la discrimination des langues par la prosodie pdf document French Languages rhythm and language acquisition pdf document Supra segmental Phonology rhythm intonation and stress timing Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Isochrony amp oldid 1151635987, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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