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On suprasegmental features Introduction So far we havebeen talking about phonetic features as they apply to single phonetic segments,or phones. Phonetic features can also apply to a string of severalsounds, such as a syllable, or an entire word or utterance. The study ofphonological features which applies to groups larger than the single segment,are known as suprasegmentalfeatures, such as the syllable or the word. The study of these features is knownas prosody. It mainly includessyllable, stress, pitch, tone, and intonation. In this paper, I will talk aboutthe suprasegmental features ingreat detail. Key words: phonetic, suprasegmental. Syllable The most obvious prosodic feature in languageis the syllable. Let's briefly discuss the notion of syllables. Like all of our other basic linguistic concepts,although everyone knows what a syllable is, the concept "syllable" isdifficult to define in absolute terms. A syllable can be divided into threeparts, that is, onset, nucleus, and coda, of which nucleus is a must. Asyllable that has no coda is called an open syllable while a syllable with codais called a closed syllable. In English only long vowels and diphthongs canoccur in open syllables. The onset may be empty or filled by a cluster of asmany as three consonants, while the coda position may be filled as many as fourconsonants. The maximal onset principle states that when there is a choice asto where to place a consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda.In some languages, syllables are always open,that is, they always end in a vowel, never a consonant. (Hawaiian) On the other hand, every Hawaiian syllable must begin with a consonant. (Aloha spoken as a single word beginsin a glottal stop.) In other languages, syllables are always closed; they mustend in a consonant (Navaho): Háá'ishah dididiljah. Let's build a fire. Táá diné 'ooljéé'go naaskai' Three men went to the moon. (LikeHawaiian, they must also begin in a consonant.)Stress The nature of stress The word stress is used differently bydifferent authors, and the relationship between stress, emphasis, accent andprominence is also defined differently. Robins has defined it as “a genericterm for the relatively greater force exerted in the articulation of part ofutterance”. The nature of stress is simple enough—practically everyone wouldagree that the first syllable of words like“father”, “open” is stressed, thatthe middle syllable is stressed in “potato”, “apartment” and the final syllableis stressed in “about”, “perhaps”, and most people feel they have some sort ofidea of what the difference is between stressed and unstressed syllables,though they might explain it in many different ways.The production of stress is generallybelieved to depend on the speaker using more muscular energy than is used forunstressed syllables. From the perceptual point of view, all stressed syllableshave one characteristic in common, and that is “prominence”. Roach hasmanifested that at least four different factors are important to make asyllable prominent:i) Loudness: Most people seem to feelthat stressed syllables are louder than unstressed ones; in other words,loudness is a component of prominence.ii) Length: The length of syllables hasan important part to play in prominence; the syllables which are made longerthan the others will be heard as stressed.iii) Pitch: Pitch in speech is closelyrelated to the frequency of vibration of the vocal folds and to the musicalnotion of low-pitched and high-pitched notes; if one syllable is said with apitch that is noticeably different from that of the others, this will have astrong tendency to produce the effect of prominence.iv) Quality: a syllable will tend to be prominentif it contains a vowel that is different in quality from neighboring vowels. Languages differ in how they use stress.1) In some languages, eachsyllable is equally stressed or unstressed,as in Cambodian2) the syllable in eachword is more stressed. Theplace of stress is fixed on acertain syllable:1) initial. Finnish,Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages2) penultimate. Polish,3) final. French.4) Complex set ofrules. In Bulgarian nouns and verbs have separate sets of rules forstress placement. Hopi (phonetic: first syllable of a two syllableword: síkwi meat; inwords of three or more syllables, accent falls on the first long vowel: máamatsi to recognize; or onthe first short vowel before a consonant cluster: péntani to write; otherwise it falls on thenext to last syllable: wunúvtu standup)The place of stress is random.1) In Russian the stress iscompletely random: xoroshó, xoróshi.2) In English the stress ismore predictable but still random. Usually a middle syllable of a longerword receives the stress. In two syllable words stress is rando and oftenrenders differences in meaning: project/toproject, produce/produce, and insult/ to insult. Some languages have more than one stress perword: English is such a language. In English, words of foursyllables or more have a primaryand a secondary stress. SomeEnglish compounds have phrasal stress on the first element of thecompound. Phrasal stress often distinguishes meaning in adjective/nouncombinations. Sentence stress in English According to He Shanfen (1992), Englishsentence stress has two main functions:⑴ to indicate the important words in thesentence; ⑵ to serve as thebasis for the rhythmic structure of the sentence. Consequently, in connected English speech,sentence stress usually falls on content ( or lexical) words, which carry thebasic meaning of a sentence, e.g. nouns, adjectives, adverbs etc. Those whichare usually unstressed in sentences are form (or structural) words, which showgrammatical relationships, such as articles, auxiliary and modal verbs,monosyllabic prepositions, etc.Pitch Another prosodic feature is pitch, defined as the frequency ofvibration of vocal cords. Pitch is measured in hertzes. Physiologically, pitch tends to be higher inwoman than in men and higher before puberty than after puberty. Also, thepitch of women's voices tends to lower with old age; the pitch of men's voicestends to get higher with age. Despite these physiological, non-linguisticuniversal, each language uses pitch distinctions for linguisticallymeaningful purposes. Startingfrom the lowest pitch on the initial syllable, the pitch of each subsequentsyllable raises until the word reaches the "peak". From that point,pitch either remains at the same level for the remainder of the word or itdrops again. The choice between maintenance of high pitch or allowing it todrop is a matter of formality: pitch is maintained in formal or careful speech,but dropped in colloquial usage.七．ConclusionBeing the most important part, suprasegmental features can not be despised in phonology research.From the whole passage, we can understand that suprasegmentalfeatures not only has its phonology significance, but also the practicaluse as well. We can not say this person is a good language user just by his orher vocabulary, as well as the grammar. Spoken language is also very useful. Ido hope that the paper will be sufficient to prove that suprasegmental features is an efficient way for our studies and encouragemore and more students to pay attention to using it.