1. Introduction
Welcome to the webpage accompanying Chapter 13 "Analysing phonetic and phonological variation on the suprasegmental level" by Ulrike Gut!
Analysing word stress can involve investigating one of the many phonological features on the suprasegmental level that can vary between speakers. As a foundation for the subsequent analysis of stress placement of 16 speakers, a theoretical description of analysing word stress is given at the beginning. The auditory as well as the acoustic method will be described, while the focus will be on the acoustic analysis of word stress with the help of the software Praat. Section 3 offers a user-friendly explanation of how to use Praat. In order to illustrate the usage of the auditory method and the acoustic method with Praat, a mini-project was carried out. In this project, German speakers of English were recorded while reading out words that differ in regard to their word stress in American and British English. In this mini-project, it is important which variety of English the speaker prefers: General American pronunciation (GA) or Received Pronunciation (RP). The question investigated is whether the speakers show consistency in their usage of the variety chosen. Hence, the question is if the speakers place the word stress in a specific word as it should be in their preferred variety. Besides, it is questioned whether there are any words in which German speakers of English show a tendency towards either GA or RP despite their preferred variety. The analysis might also show whether there are specific English words that German speakers tend to mispronounce. Reasons for German speakers being inconsistent in their usage of their chosen variety will be offered. However, no attempt will be made at explaining why German speakers of English pronounce certain words that way. The aim of the mini-project investigating word stress of German speakers of English puts two approaches into focus. First of all, the area of second language learning is of concern since this analysis concentrates on non-native speakers of English. The second area of interest is that of language variability, specifically the contrast between American and British English regarding word stress. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of the auditory and the acoustic method are presented.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot of literature concerning word stress of non-native speakers of English. Ulrike Gut’s dissertation on non-native speech (2009) presents a wide range of features on the suprasegmental level of non-native speakers, but does not investigate word stress. Regarding the speech analysis software Praat, Jörg Mayer’s manual is a great help. For advanced users of Praat, David Weenink’s detailed explanation of the software and its functions should be used.
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