The Groundwork Of English Stress

This book is a contrastive analysis of Arabs’ errors in English pronunciation regarding segmentals—consonants, consonant clusters, and vowels—and suprasegmentals—main word stress. It also explains the main interlingual reasons behind these errors, and presents some teaching suggestions for surmounting them. The findings show that the subjects substitute their own Arabic sounds for unfamiliar English ones, producing incorrect English sounds. In addition, they apply Arabic main word stress rules instead of English ones, producing incorrect English stress patterns. The book also shows that English sounds and stress patterns that are both different and more marked than corresponding Arabic ones caused learning difficulties for the subjects.

First published in 1984, this book was designed to benefit the foreign learner who wishes to grasp the essential basis of English stress so that he or she can go on to predict stress patterns in new words. It is aimed at teachers of English as a foreign language and helps them to communicate English stress effectively to their students. The book bridges the gap between books that are mainly anecdotal or abstract, practical or theoretical, or made up of lists or principles.

This book analyses Cairenes’ interlingual errors in English main word stress following Halle and Vergnaud’s (1987) metrical model and Archibald’s (1998) parameter resetting. The findings show the difficulty the research subjects had in stressing items with stress different from Cairene Colloquial Arabic (CCA) and with stress similar to CCA. The book also shows that the subjects’ correct stress patterns were due to parameter resetting, and that English stress patterns that are both different and more marked than corresponding CCA stress patterns caused learning difficulties for the subjects.

While it has long been noted that the first element of most, but not of all English nominal compounds is perceptually most prominent (e.g. TABLE cloth vs. paper CUP), a principled empirical investigation of the acoustics, perception, and the phonological distribution of these two prominence patterns has been missing. Using a corpus of spoken language, the current volume presents the first thorough and detailed investigation of these areas, while also introducing several methodological and statistical innovations to the field.