So let’s talk about melody. People have a deep appreciation for music, the rise and
fall of notes that can fill hearts and bring the sun out in a glamorous sky. But language
has a rhythm as well, of strong sounds and weaker ones that go all the way down into
the roots of our words. So how do we work out how to do all this? Don't get stressed
out: we'll take you through it. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
When we talk, we don't just drone along in a monotone, like a train chugging along
a flat track. No, our speech rises and falls, draws out and contracts, building a rhythm
that expresses what we want to say. And all spoken languages in the world do this: whatever
sentences you're building, you'll be making some of these changes to how you pitch your
syllables, how you stretch out their length, how loud you make them. It's too valuable
of a tool not to use.
That doesn't mean that all languages use all of those sound cues in the same ways, though.
Take something like changing the pitch. For some languages, like Mandarin or Karen, the
whole meaning of the word changes if you change the pitch that you pronounce a syllable with,
or if you shift the pitch over the course of the sound. Like, in Mandarin, the same
set of sounds, [hwa], can either mean “flower” 花 or “paint” 画, depending on the pitch
your voice has as you say it. This is known as tone, and the languages that use it are called
tonal languages.
In other languages, though, it's not the syllable we care about for this pitch change, but the
word, like in Japanese. So like, [ima] 今 means “now”, but [ima] 居間 means “living
room”. For “now”, the pitch drops on the first syllable, but for “living room”,
it drops on the second. And in English, we don't really use pitch changes to differentiate
between word meanings, but we do use it for adjusting how we interpret a sentence, like
changing a statement into a question. That means “You're moving to Tokyo.” has a
different meaning from “You're moving to Tokyo?” And that's just adjusting pitch –
that's only one of our phonetic tools.
We'll come back and talk about tone more in the future, but for this week, we're going
to focus on another commonly used phonological strategy: stress. But just like how people have
different ways that they show how they're stressed, languages do, too. Except it's not
by eating more or practicing their music harder, it's by having their stressed syllables show
up longer, or louder, or with a rise in pitch, or some combination of those. It's not always
the same from language to language.
But what stays common is that stress is a comparison. We can always dip down into the
phonetic information and get out for ourselves all the details about any given syllable.
And there definitely are sound markers to tell us how prominent a syllable is. But to
really find the stress in a word, we need to compare each syllable to the ones around
it. At the core of each word with stress is the foot, a pairing of a weaker and a stronger
syllable. Every language that has stress will build at least one foot into each phonological
word. Feet are where stress gets assigned, so when you hear stress in a word, you know
you've got a foothold.
Since it's a comparison between two syllables, right away we can see one way languages are
going to differ. When you build a foot, does the first or the second syllable get emphasized?
If you make the first syllable stronger, like DAH dah, you get what's known as a trochee.
So take an English name like Layla. The first part, "lay", is louder and longer than the
second syllable, "la". That shows that side has stress.
On the other hand, you could stress the second of the pair of syllables, so that you get
something like dah DAH. In that case, you're building what's known as an iamb. Take a word
like guitar. Here, the initial part "gui" is weaker than the follow-up "tar". It's a
weak-strong rhythm. Which is an iamb and which is a trochee can be hard to keep in mind at
first, but if you want a little trick, I like to think “iamb not myself.” The word iamb
itself is a strong-weak pair, making it ironically a trochee.
By the way, maybe you’ve run into these terms before, because the idea of feet also
comes up in meter for poetry. So you can find iambic pentameter, or five iambs a line, in
things like Shakespeare: “(Rough winds) (do shake) (the dar)(ling
buds) (of May), (And su)(mmer's lease) (hath all) (too short) (a date)”. Or you can find
verse in trochaic tetrameter, or four trochees, as in Blake’s “(Tyger), (Tyger), (burning)
(bright), (in the) (forest) (of the) (night)”. When our words line up, and the patterns within
our words carries right through our speech, it just feels good.
But beyond poetry, iambs and trochees actually have a significant and interesting difference
in how they get said. Remember before, we said that languages differ in what cues
they use to show where the stress is in a word? Well, it turns out there's a really
strong correlation between how you build your feet and how you mark them out in your speech.
If you build trochees, then both parts of the foot will take about as long to say as
each other… but that first syllable will be louder.
On the other hand, if your language is making iambs, then you show that the second syllable
is stressed by making it longer, not louder. This difference between how our feet get pronounced
is known as the Iambic-Trochaic Law, and it's actually borne out even in perceptual experiments.
Let's say you play listeners a stream of syllables, like just repeated [ta]s over and over again,
like ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, and have them make groups out of them.
If some of your recorded [ta]s are longer than the others, then they start parsing the stream
of [ta]s into iambs, putting the longer syllables in the second position. On the other hand,
if all your [ta]s have the same duration, but louder ones alternate with softer ones,
then people will start pairing them into trochees, signalling that they hear the first syllable
as stronger. So even how we show our stress is largely dependent on the kinds of feet
we're building.
But of course, the choice of what half of the foot we should be stressing isn’t the
only thing languages do differently when it comes to our words and their rhythms. There
are a few other concerns, too: do you just have one foot in your word, or can you have
a whole bunch of them?
When you start pairing up syllables, do you start from the right
or the left end of the word? Do you have to pair up all the syllables,
or can you have leftovers? Do you care about what’s going on inside those syllables you're building your feet
from, or not? Do you even have to count syllables, or is there something even smaller that we might care about?
That’s a lot of questions, and it would be way too stressful to try to cover all that
in one episode. So we’re going to come back and address this in the future, looking at
what happens inside the syllables, and at different ways of applying stress over a word.
But it’s good to know - we’ll have a lot of melody in our future.
For this week, though, we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space. If you followed in
my footsteps, you learned that all languages change pitch, duration, loudness, and more,
to communicate different effects; that stress is a very common way for languages to impose
a rhythm; that we build up feet, either iambs or trochees, from pairing a strong syllable
with a weak one; and that the way we create stress can depend on what kind of foot we’re making.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we'll have some extra material on this topic. Also, try dropping by our store,
where we have a bunch of cool linguistics stuff! Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter
and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe.
And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Séð þig seinna!