CHAPTER 10
Thought Groups and
Prominence
Thought groups
Can you imagine what it would be like if we kept talking
steadily without even a pause? Listeners would have a hard
time understanding our speech, and they’d soon get tired of
listening to us talk nonstop. Before long, we’d run out of
breath and our faces would turn blue. Obviously, we need to
pause when we talk.
Pauses give speakers a chance to catch their breath, but they
also make our speech easier to understand. Pauses help
listeners understand which groups of words belong together
grammatically and how the meaning is organized. When we
pause, listeners have a little time to absorb the meaning of
what we’ve said, and it’s easier for them to follow our ideas.We need to pause when we talk, but we can’t pause just
anywhere. It seems to make more sense to pause in some
places than in others. For example, which of these sentences
seems more natural? (The slash marks represent pauses.)- Last Thursday / after I left school / I went to
the supermarket/ and bought some vegetables / - Last / Thursday after / I left school I went to /
the supermarket and bought / some / vegetables /
It’s easy to see that the !rst sentence is divided more
naturally. Its pauses break the sentence up into logical parts
that each have both a grammatical structure and a chunk of
meaning. These groups of words that are divided by pauses
are called thought groups. In contrast, the parts of the
second sentence seem random and just don’t make sense.In reality, not everyone breaks up thought groups in the same
way. If someone is talking faster, he/she will probably pause
less often and have fewer thought groups; slower speech
leads to more pauses and more thought groups. In more
formal language, such as when someone is giving an
important speech, he/she often uses more pauses. These can
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