Understanding and Teaching the Pronunciation of English.pdf

be a valuable tool for the speaker to draw the
listeners’ attention to important points. The
speaker’s own style and personal preferences
can also a"ect how often he/she pauses.

In spite of these individual di"erences, we can
make some generalizations about thought
groups and how they are divided. According to
Celce-Murcia et al. (2010), thought groups have
these characteristics:

• A thought group has pauses or almost-pauses before and
  after it. We pause between thought groups, but not
  within them. A pause might not be a complete stopping
  of sound. Instead, it might just be a slowing or
  lengthening of the last stressed syllable of the thought
  group. (Murphy 2013)


• A thought group contains one prominent^ element. This
  is the word that receives the most emphasis in that
  thought group. (More information about prominence
  begins later in this chapter.)


• Each thought group has its own intonation pattern. That
  is, the speaker’s voice goes up and down in a “melody”
  for that stretch of speech. Because of this, thought groups
  are sometimes called intonation units. (There’s more
  about intonation in Chapter 11: “Intonation.”)
  
  
  • A thought group usually has its own
    grammatical structure. It’s often a phrase, a
    clause, or a sentence—a chunk of language that
    feels like it has its own structure and expresses
    a thought or a unit of meaning.
  
  
  
  

Punctuation and thought groups

In writing, we can use punctuation to show the

boundaries of phrases, clauses, and sentences. In

spoken language, of course, there is no punctuation to mark

these grammatical units. Instead, the listener must pay

attention to pauses and intonation patterns. In the following

sentences, notice the di"erence in punctuation, pauses, and

intonation and see how the meaning changes:

“Tom,” said the teacher, “is brilliant.”

Tom / said the teacher / is brilliant /

Tom said, “The teacher is brilliant.”

Tom said / the teacher is brilliant /

Although the words are the same, the meaning is completely

di"erent. In the !rst sentence, the teacher is speaking and

Tom is brilliant. In the second, Tom is speaking and the

teacher is brilliant. Here’s another example:

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10.1 Thought Groups and

Prominence