PTLC2005 Takehiko Makino A New Approach to the Teaching of English Prosody to Japanese Speakers:1
A New Approach to the Teaching of English Prosody
to Japanese Speakers, Based on the First Significant
Contrastive Analysis
Takehiko Makino, Chuo University, Tokyo
1 The premise I have just published a coursebook of English phonetics for Japanese
speakers (Makino 2005), which derives from the crude handouts which I produced in
1994 because all the available textbooks were unsatisfactory for me. When writing the
handouts, I followed what I believed to be indispensable principles in presenting the
pronunciation of a foreign language to its learners: 1) Basics of general phonetics should
be carefully introduced using examples from readers’ mother tongue (in my case,
Japanese); 2) Readers’ subconscious knowledge of their own Japanese pronunciation
should be made conscious by explicit explanations; and 3) Explanations and training of
English sounds should be accompanied by the systematic comparison of the sound
patterns of the two languages.
The principle 3) above were partly satisfied by some of the available textbooks, but
(perhaps to your surprise) there were none that satisfied 1) and 2). As for the area of
prosody, every textbook was unsatisfactory in terms of all the three principles above;
they explained second to none about Japanese prosody and abruptly began to explain
English accent and intonation. And those explanations about English prosody were also
unsatisfactory. One was just too minimal to be of use (Matsusaka 1986), others were a
little muddled about the distinction between sentence accent and intonation nucleus
(Takebayashi et al. 1991; Takebayashi and Saito 1998), and still another gave more
space to the problem of word accent assignment than how to pronounce the accent at all
(Kawagoe 1999). They all presented English as a stress-accent language (contrasted to
pitch-accented Japanese), but this characterization is suspicious, as we will see below.
I do not mean that I knew what to write instead when I began. Segmental aspects were
easy enough, but it was not until I finished reading Ladd (1996) and Venditti (in press)
two years ago that I began to feel that I could write some meaningful explanations of
English prosody which meet my own principles above. I am not sure how far the endproduct meets my expectations, and since it has not yet been tested in classrooms,
whether it will have positive effects in Japanese speakers’ learning English prosody has
yet to be seen. Below is just what I believe are the important differences between
Japanese and English prosody and how I present them in my book. Still, I believe that
my presentation is based on the first significant contrastive analysis which compares the
two prosodic systems in the same framework.
2 Phonetic facts: English As you can easily predict from above, I am heavily influenced
by the ToBI (< Tone and Break Index) framework of accent and intonation. My denial of
English as a stress-accent language partly derives from my inclination to that theory.
Beckman and Elam (1997) is a manual of ToBI for English and this is based only on
fundamental frequency. However, I would not have totally denied stress as part of
English accent had I not seen the acoustic analysis of the recording for the very book I
was writing. Figure 1 shows the fundamental frequency and intensity of the word
“personify” pronounced by an American woman. Although it is not easy to compare, the
PTLC2005 Takehiko Makino A New Approach to the Teaching of English Prosody to Japanese Speakers:2
intensity of the vowel /ɑ /, the nucleus of the primary accented syllable, is about the
same as that of /ɚ /, an unaccented vowel. Perhaps /ɑ / is a little weaker than /ɚ /
indeed. The main difference appears to be the fact that the former vowel has more pitch
change (fall, in this case) than the latter. Secondary accented /aɪ / is still weaker, but it
is to be noticed that this vowel is substantially longer than the other vowels.
Figure 1. Accent in English: “personify”
This observation leads me to regard English accent as derived from pitch change
(=intonation) and vowel length only.
3 Phonetic facts: Japanese The most important difference between English and
Japanese prosody is the relation between accent and intonation. In English, for practical
purposes, various kind of pitch change which is intonation gives a syllable an accent and
they are inseparable.
In Japanese, on the other hand, the pitch change which gives a mora (= the basic
prosodic unit in Japanese) an accent is uniformly H*L (=fall), and there is a different
category of pitch change which occurs at the end of an intonational phrase (IP
henceforth). This gives an utterance various shades of nuances and is called
“intonation.” To avoid confusion, the term “boundary pitch movement” (abbreviated to
BPM) is sometimes employed. Figure 2 shows examples of BPMs in unaccented
utterances. “Long rise” usually means questioning, surprise, and so on. “Upstep” seems
to mean insistence or emphasis of the whole IP.
Figure 2. Intonation (=Boundary Pitch Movement) in Japanese
PTLC2005 Takehiko Makino A New Approach to the Teaching of English Prosody to Japanese Speakers:3
The other important difference is the relation between Intonational phrasing and location
of the main accent. In English, these can vary independently according to the desired
meaning or emphasis. In other words, one can place IP boundary anywhere within the
restriction from syntax, and within the IPs thus made, one can place main accent
(intonation nucleus) anywhere, although the unmarked choice is the last primary
accented syllable.
In Japanese, the main accent always comes to the first accented mora in the IP; that is,
the location of the main accent restricts intonational phrasing. The other accents in the
same IP is downstepped or deleted. Figure 3 shows examples of different phrasing. You
can see that in Japanese, you have to place an IP boundary before the word you wish to
emphasise.
Figure 3. Intonational Phrasing and Sentence Accent in Japanese
As a matter of fact, the utterance on the left with three accented words within an IP is a
rather marked case. Most IPs contain only two accented words, and relative emphasis
seems to be expressed by the different pitch levels between IPs. This means that in
Japanese, there is some superordinate prosodic unit above IP that I have not studied.
However, for the purpose of presenting the difference to Japanese speakers, this
seemed enough and I have not gone into the problem any further.
4 Treatments in Previous Japanese Textbooks Most English phonetics textbooks in
Japan has probably been written with Jones (1960), Gimson (1980) and Kenyon (1950)
and so on as a model and main source. As a result, they have different chapters for
accent and intonation. Different relations between accent and intonation have not been
dealt with. This was what I felt lacking in the textbooks on the market.
5 A New Approach in Makino (2005) Now that I have something to add to the previous
treatment of English prosody, I have organized the necessary contents as below. This is
the part of the table of contents of my book where the prosodic aspects were dealt with:
10. Japanese Prosody
10.1
Word Accent
10.2
Sentence Accent and Intonational Phrase
10.3
Intonation
PTLC2005 Takehiko Makino A New Approach to the Teaching of English Prosody to Japanese Speakers:4
11. English Prosody
11.1
Accent and intonation are inseparable in English.
11.2
Word Accent
11.3
Sentence Accent
11.3.1 Word Classes That Carry Accent and That Do Not
11.3.2 Weak Forms of Function Words
11.3.3 Locations of Tonic Nucleus (Main Accent)
11.3.4 Content Words That Are Not Strongly Accented
11.3.5 Function Words That Are Accented
11.3.6 Accent in Compound Words
11.3.7 Rhythm in English Speech
11.4
Intonation
11.4.1 Constituents of Intonational Phrase
11.4.2 Uses of Nuclear Tones
References
Beckman, Mary E. and Gayle Ayers Elam (1997) “Guidelines for ToBI Labelling (version
3.0).” http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/ame_tobi/labelling_guide_v3.pdf
Jones, Daniel (1960) An Outline of English Phonetics 9th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gimson, Alfred Charles (1980) An Introduction to the pronunciation of English. 3rd ed.
London: Arnold.
Kawagoe, Itsue (1999) Eigo-no Onsei-wo Kagaku-suru. [Doing Science on the
Pronunciation of English.] Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Company.
Kenyon, John Samuel (1950) American Pronunciation. 10th ed. Ann Arbor: Wahr.
Ladd, D. R. (1996) Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Makino, Takehiko (2005) Nihonjin no Tame no Eigo Onseigaku Lesson. [Lessons in
English Phonetics for Japanese Speakers.] Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Company.
Matsusaka, Hiroshi (1986) Eigo Onseigaku Nyūmon. [An Introduction to English
Phonetics.] Tokyo: Kenkyusha Publishing Company.
Takebayashi, Shigeru, Mayako Watanabe, Atsuko Shimizu and Hiroko Saito (1991)
Tokyo: Taishukan
Shokyū Eigo Onseigaku. [Elementary English Phonetics.]
Publishing Company.
Takebayashi, Shigeru and Hiroko Saito (1998) Kaitei Shimpan Eigo Onseigaku Nyūmon.
[An Introduction to English Phonetics, New Revised ed.] Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing
Company.
Venditti, J. J. (in press) “The J-ToBI model of Japanese intonation.” In S.-A. Jun (ed.)
Prosodic Typology and Transcription: A Unified Approach. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~jjv/pubs/jtobi-webversion.doc