English Prosody: Rhythm and Melody
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Narrated by:
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Dr. John Byrnes
About this listen
Prosody is concerned with properties that provide fluidity to speech: i.e., rhythm and melody. Rhythm means a regular pattern in the flow of things, such as the tick, tick, tick of a clock or the lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of a beating heart. Melody means the ups and downs of voice. All spoken languages have rhythm and melody, but they differ in the way they occur and perform in speech. Speaking English fluently implies the ability to produce the rhythm and melody proper to English, the learning of which is the goal of this audiobook.
The rhythm and melody of English arise due to two characteristics of the English language: English is a stress-timed language and an intonation language. The former characteristic relates to the fact that English natives tend to distribute stressed syllables to occur at a similar distance in time, sounding TA-dum-dum, TA-dum-dum, TA-dum-dum. This regular timing in the occurrence of stressed syllables creates rhythm in English. The latter characteristic relates to the fact that English natives employ a pitch change to change sentences. Pitch used for this purpose is called intonation.
In English, identical sentences with different intonations can have opposite meanings. For example, the sentence “John seems like a nice guy” can have opposite meanings when maximal pitch is given to “guy” and to “seems”, respectively. (The word that receives the maximal pitch is called the focus word (focus words are in upper case)): John seems like a nice guy (speaker thinks John is nice); John seems like a nice guy (speaker does not think John is nice). Since intonation makes the voice move up and down, it creates melody.
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- The Ingredients of Language
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
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Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
- By Tristan on 04-10-16
By: Steven Pinker
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How to Speak and Write Correctly
- By: Joseph Devlin
- Narrated by: Shawn Grisden
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This book has no pretension about it whatever -- it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to express themselves in ordinary, everyday language, in a proper manner.
By: Joseph Devlin
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You Say Potato: A Book About Accents
- By: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
- Narrated by: David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Jane Savage, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people say 'sconn' while others say 'schown'. He says 'bath' while she says 'bahth'. You say 'potayto'. I say 'potahto'. And - wait a second, no one says 'potahto'. No one's ever said 'potahto'. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of received pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father, David, travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
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Wish there were more native recordings.
- By Matt Dobler on 07-01-16
By: Ben Crystal, and others
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How to Write Short
- Word Craft for Fast Times
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Write Short , Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed - from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services.
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Ironically long
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
What listeners say about English Prosody: Rhythm and Melody
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- RB
- 01-03-22
very interesting
As a native speaker of American English, I found this book very interesting. Much of the content was intuitive to me, however I could imagine this work being very useful to a non-native speaker, who was seeking to speak English in a fluent style. I have a weird background, having studied the International Phonetic Alphabet, and scansion for textual analysis in my undergraduate degree, in the Performing Arts. while some of the granular details might be a bit dry, this book is worth a read 4 anyone interested in improving their English, or appreciating the spoken language more fully.
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