Short sentences are an excellent way to get comfortable with intonation. And being very confident with saying short sentences gives you an excellent foundation to build on for understanding phrasing and longer sentences.
Grammatically, a complete sentence must have a noun and a verb. This is important to know, and the rules of grammar are extremely valuable and important to follow whenever possible. However, in spoken conversation, as well as informal writing, phrases or even single words are often used instead of complete sentences. Since our focus is on spoken English and communication, we’ll examine intonation by looking at some short sentences and phrases.
Let’s look at a common phrase, which uses a subject pronoun and a verb.
I WAS WORKING.
Let’s look first at the verb which is written in the participle form. ING is a common unstressed prefix. The intonation of this word is DA-d. It’s useful to practice just saying the nonsense syllables DA-d to really get used to keeping your mental focus on the sound DA, and letting the sound “d” just drop out of your mouth, without much energy. “d” is a shorter sound and is lower in pitch. Rather than thinking of just making DA longer, remember that there is a vowel peak contained within it. Practice DA-d a few times, and then say “WORKING,” using the same intonation pattern you used for DA-d. Say “working” a few more times so that it starts to feel like it can be said without really having to think about anything like intonation or pronunciation. Think of how you would say that word in your first language. It’s pretty effortless to say it, isn’t it? That’s our goal — we don’t have to reach that ideal immediately, but it’s worth keeping that in mind. Do enough repetition and technical drilling that you can have some of that effortlessness in your speech.
While there are plenty of circumstances when pronouns are stressed, the general rule is that they are not stressed. The logic behind this is that we are usually using a pronoun because we know who we are talking about. There are many different reasons why words may be stressed, but the most common one is when the word is new or important information. If we imagine a short exchange like this:
John called. He’s working until 6.
In the first sentence the new information (who? what?) is conveyed. Both words are important; maybe “John” is the most important word, but “called” is important as well. In the second sentence, it’s obvious who we’re talking about when we say “he,” so there is no reason to stress it. The important words in the second sentence are “work” and “six.”
(Actors beware! Drama, especially human drama, can change all the rules when it comes to pronouns. You might have a scene that is filled with stressed pronouns – such as an argument – e.g. “I’ve done everything,” “It’s not MY fault,” “YOU caused this.”)
Under the right circumstances, there could be a logic behind stressing just about any word. If the word “WAS” stands by itself as a verb in a sentence, it will have some degree of stress. But more frequently the word “was” is a helping verb and it should not be stressed.
Remember, stress is what helps the listener know what word to focus on. And along with stressing key words (also called operative words), we need to de-stress (reduce) unimportant words. If you think of taking a picture, you want the subject to be in focus, but the foreground and background to be out of focus. It makes a more attractive picture and it lets the viewer know what the subject is. Our speech can be very clear and direct if we keep the subject in focus by stressing the key words and reducing the function words.
The building blocks of intonation work are the individual syllable (with their pitch tones — short flat, long drop, and vowel peak), as well as the two-syllable patterns DA-d and d-DA.
A good pattern for practicing d-DA is “I VERB.”
First practice d-DA as nonsense syllables, making sure:
1. your mental focus is already on DA — you can think of hopping over the sound “d” to get to the main thought DA;
2. “d” is spoken with very little breath, short, and on a lower pitch; and
3. DA is on a higher pitch, and made longer by using a vowel peak.
Once the nonsense syllables feel comfortable in your body, go through a list of one-syllable verbs, thinking and saying the sentences, starting with the word “I.” (do, go, have, know, will, can, should, did, might).
We can build on DA-d and d-DA by adding additional syllables. If we add an unstressed “d” we have 3 possibilities:
d-DA-d
d-d-DA
DA-d-d
Say d-d-DA a few times to get the rhythm comfortable in your body.
Then let’s change the unstressed “d-d” to two different unstressed sounds “i-wz” We are saying the words “I WAS” in a reduced manner. But don’t think of these as words right now. This is an exercise and it’s important to think of this as just being the two unstressed sounds “i-wz.” These are unstressed sounds, not words.
When I work with people in live sessions, I try to get patterns into their speaking using nonsense sounds for as long as possible before going onto actual words. This is because when our body does something repeatedly for a long period of time, that action becomes a reflex. If someone has learned a phrase like “I WAS WORKING” and then over many years repeated that phrase (and similar phrases), over-pronouncing syllables that should be unstressed, it will initially be hard for them to reduce the sounds to an appropriate unstressed level.
But if I have them focus on d-d-DA as an isolated exercise, they can very quickly get that into their body. If you change “d-d” to “i-wz” and continue to treat this like an exercise, it should be quite easy to say “i-wz-DA.” Continue to repeat this pattern by changing “DA” to other nonsense syllables. A nonsense syllable is just a consonant followed by a vowel (MAH, MEE, MAY, BAH, SHAY, TAY, BEE, etc.)
The next step I usually take is to change the nonsense syllables into verbs. But I usually mention that we want to continue to think of this as an exercise. We are going to be saying things that sound like illogical or incorrect sentences, like “I was TAKE” and “I was SEE.” So try not to be distracted by that. Just keep treating this like it’s an exercise. Go through a list of verbs (such as MAKE, TAKE, GO, SHOW, SEE, BE, GET, FIX, HELP).
Next it’s worth revisiting for a moment the DA-d intonation pattern. You could say DA-d once to remind yourself. Then look at your same verb list and say verbs like “MAKING” keeping the same intonation as you had with DA-d. Focus on the verb root, and let the unstressed -ING suffix just gently fall out of your mouth.
At this point, if I think someone is slightly over-pronouncing the ING suffix, I’ll alternate between the verb in its stem form (without ING) and then the verb with the ING ending. I’ll make the point that we want our mental thought each time to be on the verb. The first time we think the verb and we say the verb. The second time we think the verb (again in stem form only) and we say the verb +ING.
This can significantly shift the quality and effectiveness of their speaking, although the difference may be imperceptible to the casual observer. The desired result can best be described as having better flow and sounding more natural.
For the speaker (student) the effect is one of speaking with less effort. It’s possible that a long time ago they had to put a lot of energy into thinking of the ING ending when it was spoken. Over time they developed a habit of saying -ING with too much mental energy, too much breath, and maybe too much length. It’s hard to get results if you say to someone “don’t focus on that sound.” (You can’t really focus on not focusing on something; rather you have to focus on something else.) Instead, if you get them to truly focus on the stressed sound, they’ll probably find that they are able to say the -ING ending without thinking about it. Another phrase that comes to mind for the -ING is “let it happen.”
(One other note about this section: I have described here starting with alternating between the verb stem and verb+ING. If at that point it seems like someone is having a hard time practicing this DA-d pattern after returning to it from d-d-DA, then I’ll just return to nonsense syllables for a little bit and then come back to verbs. The approach with nonsense syllables would be to focus on just the syllable and not ING each time as we say: BA.. BA-ing… DEE…. DEE-ing…. MAY…. MAY-ing…. etc. *It’s also interesting that some of the nonsense syllables might actually be verbs, such as “be,” “go,” and “see.”)
The next step is to put together our detailed drilling of d-d-DA and DA-d. We’ve been drilling the first half and then the second half of the phrase d-d-DA-d. Now we’re ready to put it all together. If there have been no interruptions and we have been focused just on this work, it’s probably possible to go right to this without starting with nonsense syllables.
For the first 2 or 3 verbs, I would probably not put the two parts together yet, but just give each half independently, to get the learner comfortable and relaxed with the pattern.
i was TAKE ……… TAKing
i was MAKE ….. MAKing
If I see any concern, then we just go back a step and do it with nonsense syllables (i wz BAH…. BAH-ing). If that seems difficult (and it might, and that’s okay — this is very specific work), then I would go back to ALL nonsense syllables ( d-d-DA ….. DA-d)
I was TRY …. TRYing
Next we give the two halves and then the whole phrase.
I was TRY …. TRYing ….. I was TRYing
(In my sessions we are not usually looking at words on paper, although reading and looking at words is an important skill to get comfortable with. If you are reading this article now, be aware that when your eye sees “I was” it might make it easy for your body to revert to a pattern of over-pronouncing. You could make an effort to look away from the page when you say the phrase. Look down at the page, see the phrase, and then look away from the written word when you practice saying it. (This is similar to a valuable method often used by actors, first introduced to me by the late Harold Guskin* in the 1990’s. He often referred to “taking it off the page.”) You could also re-write “I was” or imagine it re-written the way we did in the early part of this article, as “i w’z.”
I wz LOOK ….. LOOKing ….. I wz LOOKing
Continue drilling this pattern out loud with more one-syllable verbs. (go, see, show, do, have, spend, fix, be)
Let’s look at another example of a common phrase that uses this intonation pattern d-d-DA.
The phrase is:
IN THE PARK.
It’s not the only possible intonation pattern, but it is the most likely one we would hear. The content word is PARK. We want that word to stand out. The first two words are a preposition and an article. These are a good example of function words. They are important in holding the sentence together, but they don’t have a lot of meaning themselves. We would expect them to be reduced. Again, this is not a complete sentence, but it could certainly be a complete response.
We are not focused on pronunciation in this article, but it’s worth noting that the sound N, which is ordinarily made by touching the tip of the tongue to the gum ridge without touching the teeth, should in this case be made by touching the tip of the tongue to the gum ridge and the upper front teeth because the sound comes immediately before the sound TH. The rule to remember is that T, D, N, and L are made by touching the tip of the tongue to the gum ridge, just behind the upper front teeth. The sounds should not be dentalized (which means not touching the teeth with the tip of the tongue) unless they are immediately before the voiced or unvoiced TH sound, either within a word such as the words “tenth” and “health,” or in adjacent words, such as in the phrase “did they” or ”in the.”
Once you’re comfortable with “in the park,” you can practice the phrase with other nouns (bank, back, front, store, class, bus).
Looking ahead:
How would you practice saying a sentence like this?
I was working in the store.
Can you think of a few more sentences that would have the exact same intonation pattern? Feel free to use different nouns and verbs.
How many more sentences could you come up with if you could also change the preposition? (to, at, on, for, from)
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