WHERE THINGS CAN GO WRONG

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Phonology

 

◈ WHERE THINGS CAN GO WRONG

 

■ Inappropriate prosody can involve quite subtle types of miscommunication, types that are not as obvious as confusion at the segmental level, which the listener is typically able to correct by using context or knowledge of the world. It is thus often difficult to detect prosodic problems as “errors," and they easily get misconstrued by the listener as unintended messages or inappropriate behaviors. 

 

 

 

◈ INTONATION 

■ Native speakers of Yoruba tended to superimpose the vowel length and the falling-rising pattern for their word beeni (the equivalent of “yes”) on the English word yes. This frequently occurred in interactions where, in response to a question in English such as “Are you coming to our supper party on Saturday?", the Yoruba speaker uttered a long-drawn-out “Yes” utterance that began high, then fell, and then rose again: 


■ Several native English speakers - both British and North American - who did not know Yoruba came to a similar conclusion: Yorubas were wishy-washy people, unable to respond with a decisive “yes” or “no” when asked a simple question. 


■ The native speakers of Greek, who were advanced level and highly fluent in English, tended nonetheless to superimpose the falling Gre intonation for yes/no questions onto the English yes/no questions they uttered. This made the Greeks seem impatient and rude to the English speakers who evaluated the questions of all four speakers. The native English speakers' intonation, by contrast, tended to rise.


■ In Argyres' study, native English-speaking judges listened to many instances of these yes-no questions in randomized order on a tape recording; they rated the questions of the native Greek speakers as being significantly ruder and rated their questions as being more negative than those of the native English speakers. 


■ Gumperz (1978) provides yet another example, this one involving Indian-English speakers working as food servers in a cafeteria in England. Their speech is perceived by their British interlocutors (i.e., the customers at the cafeteria) as “insulting" because of inappropriate intonation and pausing, the result of transfer from their regional dialect of Indian English. 


■ Such miscommunication problems are extremely insidious and hard to explain to both those who produce them and those who miscomprehend them. The existence of such problems, however, underscores the urgency of getting language teachers to understand how intonation functions in oral discourse, as well as the necessity of helping them to develop some strategies for teaching appropriate intonation to nonnative speakers.

 

 

 

 

◈ RHYTHM

 

■ When multisyllabic words are pronounced with an incorrect rhythm, some serious or humorous errors in comprehension may occur. 


■ Intonation errors miscommunicate the speakers stance, politeness, and intentions; errors in word stress and other aspects of rhythm often miscommunicate an important piece of information in the speaker's message.