Rhythm and Stress in English

Now that the Phonetics and Phonology Module is approaching, I have spent some time in my mind trying to recall the basic concepts in this area and how their understanding can immensely improve the way we, Spanish speakers, utter sentences in English. When I first took Phonetics at college about 11 years ago, I discovered the nature of Spanish and we were explained the patterns in terms of the time needed to utter each syllable of any word. It turns out that in Spanish when a series of words are pronounced in a single utterance, each syllable will have the same length in terms of the time. That makes Spanish a syllable timed language, where each and every syllable will last about the same, making the rhythm really even. If I take the word Venezuela in Spanish, there are four syllables and the pattern is OOOO.

However, having understood this notion, we part to analyse stress in English, if I take the same word in English Venezuela, the pattern will be ooOo. A long time ago, a teacher of mine advised me, if you really want to sound like a native speaker, get acquainted with English vowels. English is defined as a stress timed language, not all syllables in a determined utterance have the same length when pronouncing them. First, there are two types of word categories in English: content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) the one that carry meaning and linking words (pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjuctions, etc) that are like the cement that glues together all the content bricks. Only content words carry stress in English, generally one syllable in a determined word will have a longer length, the other syllables will be weak and so will be the linking works sorrounding them. 

To exemplify this I will use a sentence. This time around a Stephen King's quote: 

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work"

The colored words will not be stressed and the vowels used in them will be weak (they are all pronounced with a shwa /ə/). This means that these words will not affect the total time it takes to produce the sentence. Now, the syllables in bold letters are the ones that carry the stress and will be the strong ones in terms of duration, all the others, as the linking words, will be weak and will be pronounced with weak vowels or usually a shwa /ə/.

I will get back to these concepts later for they are really important to me. I must do some deeper research and freshen up these notions. I know that the important matter when learning a new language is communication and getting meaning accross, however, I am convinced that teachers can take huge advantage of these phenomena and improve the way we utter, breaking our syllable timed language style and using English stress timed rhythm; the students will be thankful in the future. Having said that, I have to keep on reading and practicing.