Suprasegmentals

The descriptors and symbols introduced so far provide a good basis for analysing the sounds of any language. The IPA enables us, moreover, to divide up connected speech into individual sounds, or segments, which we can present in ordered sequence, for example:

But the neat boundaries between phones that such sequences imply are something of a fiction. Speech sounds roll into one another, and one sound can significantly influence its neighbours. Take the vowel in ran in the example above, for instance, which for most British English speakers sounds slightly different from that of rat, having a slight nasal quality that the latter lacks. This is because speakers generally lower the velum in readiness for the nasal consonant [n] well before the vowel has completed, with the result that nasality affects both segments and cannot be seen as the exclusive property of the consonant, as the broad linear transcription above suggests. A number of other phenomena can only be analyzed above and beyond the level of the segment: these are known, appropriately enough, as suprasegmentals.

Segments of speech

• Speech is continuous and does not divide neatly into discrete sounds, in the way that written words and sentences are built from individual letters and spaces. For this reason phoneticians refer to their divisions of the speech chain as segments.

• IPA symbols can be used to represent the segments of a speech chain on the page, e.g. cat [kat].

One type of suprasegmental is stress, which refers to the relative prominence of one syllable over another in a word. In English, for example, the sequence of segments in the noun increase and its corresponding verb increase is the same, but the two forms sound different because a different syllable (underlined here) is stressed in each case. An unstressed vowel is sometimes reduced in quality, being given less prominence and articulatory effort. The first syllable in photograph for example has the diphthong , but in unstressed position in photography this reduces to . Stress is generally indicated by a raised diacritic before the stressed syllable, so for the examples above photograph  but photography . Stress is a relative concept, referring to the prominence of one syllable with respect to another, and involves a combination of pitch (stressed syllables have a higher frequency or pitch than unstressed ones), loudness or intensity and possibly vowel length. Length itself is also a relative rather than absolute concept, or an inherent quality of a speech sound itself. The vowels  caught and  in cart, for example, are viewed as long vowels because English speakers generally pronounce them longer than vowels such as  and [a], but it is important to remember here that one speaker’s  may be shorter than another’s [a].

Other important suprasegmental phenomena include intonation and tone, both of which involve changes in pitch within a word or sentence. For example, a simple English sentence like You see him every Saturday would be pronounced with a falling intonation if uttered as a statement, but with a rising intonation at the end if intended as question (You see him every Saturday?). Orthographically, question marks can provide a rough and ready indication of rising intonation, but in most cases readers have to deduce the appropriate intonation for themselves, as conventional writing lacks the resources to make intonation patterns clear. Linguists generally indicate only as much information as the context demands, either via intonation contour lines above the speech string or arrows after the relevant sequence to show the intonation pattern involved, for example a fall ↘; a rise ↗, or a rise–fall ↗↘. In tone languages word-level intonation is important for distinguishing meaning. In Thai, for example, the same sequence of segments uttered with a level, falling or rising tone will have a completely different meaning, as this example (taken from Blake 2008: 139) illustrates: