The basic unit of the rhythmic organization of speech and the problem of its phonetic delimitation in an utterance

English rhythm presupposes that utterance stress serves as a basis for the rhythmical organization of speech and that stresses segment the speech continuum into units of more or less equal length. These are ACCENTUAL, or RHYTHMIC UNITS. Rhythmic units are nothing but elements of rhythm. Rhythm as regularity of occurence of stressed syllables manifests itself in hierarchically higher prosodic units - intonation groups and utterances.

Since the approximate isochrony of intervals between stressed syllables is regarded as a measure of English rhythm, a great number of phoneticians (A/ Classe, D. Abercrombie, H. Halliday, J. Pring) define the unit of rhythm as a sequence of syllables from 1 stressed syllable to another. But this formal rhythmic division does not reflect the relations between prosodic units and the units of the other subsystems of the language, as the syllables of one and the same word may be parts of different rhythmic units (semantic importance).

G. Torsuyev, V. Vassilyev, R. Kingdon, J. O'Connor, W. Jassem and other scholars represent another approach to rhythmic division. According to this approach the boundaries between rhythmic units are determined by the semantic and grammatical relations between the wrods of an utterance. With such rhythmic division the syllables of a word always belong to the same rhythmic unit, form words join the stressed syllable as proclitics and enclitics, depending on their semantic links.

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