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Rhythm
There is a very clear tendency in English to organize an utterance around stressed syllables according to a
regular rhythm. This does not mean, of course, that you should speak English with a kind of precise mental
metronome, but there is a very clear tendency towards this kind of rhythmical pattern. One implication of this is
that the unstressed syllables between stressed syllables tend to contract or expand to fill the time available. Here
are some examples of phrases with zero, one, two, or three syllables between the stressed syllables (in bold
print). Repeat after the recording :
1 a good boy (zero syllables)
2 as good as gold (one syllable)
3 as quick as a flash (two syllables)
4 as nutty as a fruit cake (three syllables)
Tub-thumping politicians with a robust oratorical style tend to stress a large proportion of the words in
their speeches, as if to underline the importance of what they have to say. There are consequently relatively few
unstressed syllables to fit in between the stressed syllables. This is an example of the sort of thing I mean :
"The people
of this country
prepared to sit back and let Whitehall mandarins rule their lives.
is high time the British government took notice of what the people really want."

are no longer
It

Less deliberately emphatic speech contains a much higher proportion of unstressed syllables. Let's look
at an example :
This is the paper I bought yesterday morning
The stress will fall (in a fairly neutral sort of context) on This, 'paper, bought, 'yesterday, and 'morning.
This gives :
'This is the 'paper I 'bought 'yesterday 'morning
You will notice the relatively regular rhythm. What this means is that the unstressed syllables will tend to
be pronounced rather faster to squeeze them up to maintain the approximately regular rhythmic beat on the
stressed syllables.

Intonation

Intonation serves two basic types of function in English. It can serve to let your listener know whether or
not you have finished your sentence, or whether, on the contrary, you intend to add to what you have just said,
and, for example, whether you are making a statement or asking a question. It can also serve to convey
information about your attitude. Are you trying to be friendly, or helpful, or are you being cold and hostile?
The first of these two uses is conveniently illustrated by the example of lists. When you are giving a list,
you need to signal whether the list is finished or not. For example if somebody asks you which countries in
Europe you have been to, you might say, "I've been to Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England and Sweden.
Each item before "Sweden" will be pronounced with rising intonation, and "Sweden", the last item in your list,
with falling intonation. To take another example, if you want to offer your guests a drink, and you only have
sherry and whisky, you might ask, "Would you like sherry or whisky." The falling intonation on the last element
of the list should signal to your guests that it's no good asking for port, gin, or anything else. If, however, your
drinks cabinet is remarkably well stocked, so much so that you have difficulty in remembering everything you
could offer your guests, you might use the same sentence as above, but with a different intonation pattern to
suggest that the list of drinks you mention is by no means exhaustive: "Would you like sherry, or whisky ...".
It can also be used in some rather more complicated "grammatical" contexts, to signal for example a
parenthesis. Consider this example :
"The capitalism that President Smith advocates, for it is capitalism, however strenuously he and his
advisers deny it, is of a kind that his electorate will find increasingly difficult to accept."
The boundaries of the parenthetic remark " ... for it is capitalism, however strenuously he and his
advisers deny it, ..." are signalled by intonation markers. This would involve rising intonation at the end of the
part of the sentence which comes before the parenthesis, to show that the sentence is not finished, and then
rising intonation again at the end of the parenthesis, followed by an intonation pattern that seems to carry on
from where it was interrupted.
Another example of the way in which intonation and "sentence stress" can provide a kind of "audible
punctuation" occurs when a contrast is made within an utterance. Take this example:
"You might enjoy watching Sumo wrestling on television, but I certainly don't!"
The words which should stand out are undelined. In a sense, the intonation pattern corresponds to a kind
of "audible underlining".
In the following example, however, only intelligent reading will enable you to mentally underline the
words involved in the contrast, here "Arthur" and "Janet" in the second sentence. Listen :
"Arthur took Janet to the theatre to see Tom Stoppard's play 'Travesties'. Arthur thought it was the
funniest play he had ever seen, but Janet said she had never been so bored in all her life."
Intonation is also used to distinguish statements from questions and so on, and I would like to turn to this
particular function of intonation before we go on to look at how intonation can convey information as to the
speaker's attitude. This brief review of intonation in English will inevitably be rather simplified because of lack
of time.