Definition of Rhythm

In phonetics, the sense of movement in speech, marked by the stress, timing, and quantity of syllables.

The notion of rhythm involves some noticeable event happening at regular intervals of time; one can detect rhythm of a heart-beat, of flashing light or a piece of music. It has often been claimed that English speech in rythmical, and that the rhythm is detectable in the regular ocurrence of stressed syllables; of course, is not suggested that the timing is a regular as a clock- the regularity of ocurrence is only relative. The theory that english has a stress-timed rhythm implies that stressed syllables will tend to occur at relatively regular intervals whether they are separated by unstressed syllables or not; this would not be the case in " mechanical speech". and example is given below. In this sentence, the stressed syllable are given numbers: syllable 1 and 2 are not separated by any unstressed syllable, 2 and 3 are separated by one unstressed syllable, 3 and 4 by two and 4 and 5 three.