Roughing up a sentence

Image from here

Hi Sue,

Thanks for your comments on speed of speech, and giving us an insight into the psychological dimension of perception of speed.

There’s so much to say in response, but I’d like to take up something that you say right at the end in your mention of ‘little asides and lead-ins’.

I call these things ‘Drafting phenomena’ – phenomena that we don’t see in prepared speech, or in the written language: filled pauses and lexical filled pauses (level tones on words which have the same ‘buying-time’ function as filled pauses), and inserts such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’ and softeners such as ‘kind of like’. Expert listeners don’t notice them (unless they have become an annoyingly frequent habit), it is almost as if they are edited out of the sound track before we begin to process meaning. But they are there, and they contribute to the soundsubstance of spontaneous speech. They are there in the jungle.

For fun, I’d like to suggest taking a textbook sentence (greenhouse/garden) and then roughing it up with a bit of the jungle – these drafting phenomena.

So we could take a sentence from a textbook: ‘It’s the second biggest city in my country I think’, and then put it through the following stages.

Greenhouse/Garden:

|| it’s the SECond BIGgest CITy in my COUNtry i think ||

Or rather, following Mark’s suggestion, in two speech units, one triple prominence, one single:

|| it’s the SECond BIGgest CITy || in my COUNtry i think ||

Then we could demonstrate to students how to rough this up:

01 || UM ||
02 || i mean IT’S ||
03 || you KNOW ||
04 || THE ||
05 || SECond ||
06 || kind of like BIGgest ||
07 || CIty in my COUNtry i think ||

Rough up 1

OR

01 ||  i mean IT’S ||
02 || UM ||
03 || you KNOW ||
04 || it it it’s THE ||
05 || kind of like SECond ||
06 || sort of BIGgest ||
07 || CIty in my COUNtry i think ||

Rough up 2

And then we could get them to rough up sentences of their own choosing – doing garden versions, and then jungle versions, and performing them for their classmates.