English is a stress-timed language I

The tall people represent the only stressed syllables in the sentence.

English is a stress-timed language. In other words, the strong stresses come along at regular intervals in a galloping rhythm. The stresses repeat evenly, like the hoofbeats of a fast-moving horse.

This has certain implications for those who are learning the language. One obvious one is that unstressed syllables are elided, sometimes almost to the point of non-existence. In unstressed syllables, the vowel is usually minimized, reduced to an unaccented schwa sound, and that can make these syllables hard for language students to hear.

A second implication, one that can be hard for second language learners to grasp, is that no matter how many unstressed function words and syllables occur between the stressed syllables, the rhythm remains fixed. More syllables between stresses just means that they must be elided more and pronounced faster. If there are no other syllables between the strongly stressed ones, there is enough of a pause between them so that the rhythm remains unaltered.

A further important fact is that in general, nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are the strongly stressed. If these words are polysyllabic, only ONE syllable has strong stress; in fact, the others are elided, as in the word going. The stress is on the first syllable, and the /ng/ is shortened to /n/in rapid informal speech.

To see how this works in practical terms, let's look at a stanza from a poem by the fanciful children's poet Dennis Lee. The strong stresses are in capital letters.

"i WENT to PLAY in the PARK
and i DID'nt GET HOME until DARK
and WHEN i got HOME there were ANTS in my PANTS
and my FAther was FEEDing the SHARK."

As we can see from the stanza above, sometimes there are are a couple of syllables between the strong stresses, and sometimes there are none.

Stay tuned for Part II, where I reveal other parts of speech that get strong stress in certain contexts.