PETER ROACH'S THEORIES REGARDING RHYTHM

  

The stress-timed theory states that the times from each stressed syllable to the next will tend to be the same, irrespective of the number of intervening unstressed syllables. The theory also claims that while some languages (e.g Russian and Arabie) have stress-timed rhythm similar to that of English, others ( such French, Telugu and Yoruba); in these languages all syllables, whether stressed or unstressed, tend to occur  at regular time intervals and the time between syllables will be shorter or longer in proportion to the number of unstressed syllables. Some writers have developed theories of English rhythm in which a unit of rhythm, the foot, is used (with an obvious parallel in the metrical analysis of verse); the foot begins with stressed syllable and includes all following unstressed syllables up to (but not including) the following stressed syllable. The example sentence given in "Definition of Rhythm" would be divided into feet as follows:

Some theories of rhythm go further than this, and point to the fact that some feet are stronger than others, producing strong-weak patterns in larger pieces of speech above the level of the foot. To understand how this could be done, let's start with a simple example: the word "twenty" has one strong and one weak syllable, forming one foot. A diagram of it's rhythmical structure can be made, where S stands for "strong" and W for "weak".

The word "places" has the same form:

Now consider the phrase "twenty places", where "places" will normally carry stronger stress than "twenty", i.e will be rhytmically stronger.

We can make our "tree diagram" grow to look like this:

If we then look at this phrase in the context of a longer phrase "twenty places further back", and build up the "further back" part in a similar way, we would end up with an even more elaborate structure.

By analysing speech in this way we are able  to show the relationships between strong and weak elements, and the different levels of stress that we find. The strength of any particular syllable can be measured by counting up the number of times and S occurs above it; the levels in the sentence shown above can be diagramed like this (leaving out syllables that have never received stress at any level):