Pausing within Sentences
Pausing in English
Part 4
English Pronunciation Lesson
Series on Stress and Rhythm in English
Introduction
Speaking clearly and being understood when speaking English isn’t just about pronouncing vowels and consonants correctly, or even using the correct rhythm, stress and connected speech pronunciation rules.
Another key to speaking clearly and being understood is pausing between groups of words in your sentences.
That means, native English speakers do not speak continuously. In fact, they take tiny pauses (meaning, they don’t speak for a fraction of a second) between groups of words.
#1 Give the listener time to understand your words.
(1) Taking a very short pause between groups of words (called “thought groups“) gives your listener the opportunity to digest, take in and understand what you have already said, without having to worry about what you are going to say next.
Example
Compare the pronunciation of the following two sentences. (“/” = pause)
1) “Why would you go to school when you could work and earn money?”
versus
2) “Why would you go to school / when you could work / and earn money?”
The second sentence is much easier to understand–even for a native speaker–because I very slightly paused between thought groups, those groups of words that presented a thought together. This allowed the listener to digest and understand each part of the sentence before going on to the next part of the sentence.
→ Remember, the pause is very short and quick, but very effective.
#2 Emphasize one main word in a group of words.
(Pausing + Stress)
Pausing is also necessary to be understood, because when starting a conversation, English speakers unconsciously emphasize the last content word of the thought group. Therefore, the last content word of the thought group will be pronounced with more stress and a higher pitch.
Example
I didn’t just say:
“Why would you go to school / when you could work / and earn money?”
In addition to pausing between thought groups, I emphasized the last content words of those thought groups. Here, I add extra stress to three nouns: “school”, “work” and “money”.
Listen and Repeat
“Why would you go to SCHOOL / when you could WORK / and earn MOney?”
→ Did you hear that I paused and added a bit of extra stress to the last content words of each thought group?
“Why would you go to SCHOOL / when you could WORK / and earn MOney?”
Remember, in English, it is the speaker’s job to be very clear. It is NOT the listener’s job to work hard to understand the speech. So, pausing and stressing content words is an important way that English speakers can be clear.
Content Words
There are 7 categories of content words that you can emphasize in a thought group. Content words are those words that carry the meaning of a sentence. These include:
Nouns (“dog”)
Main Verbs (“walk”)
Adjectives (“beautiful”)
Adverbs (“quickly”)
Interjections (“wow!”)
Negatives (“not”)
Wh-words (“what”)
So, to review, when thinking about pausing when speaking English, we do two things:
1) Pause between thought groups, groups of words that create a thought; and
2) Emphasize the last content word in each thought group when starting a conversation.
Note that the rules of emphasis in a thought group will change if you are:
– contrasting ideas
– presenting new information
– correcting an error; or
– emphasizing agreement.
Let’s practice pausing between thought groups and emphasizing the last content word when starting a conversation.
Listen and Repeat
Notice where I’m pausing and what content words I’m emphasizing.
“Excuse me. / Where is the bathroom?”
“Now that I see it, / I think I prefer it in red.”
“She hasn’t told me, / but I think she’ll get married soon.”
“She’s pregnant! / And due in October!”
“I got a new puppy, / but now I need to train her!”
“Though Steve Jobs is irreplaceable, / I think Apple can succeed without him.”
[Notice that I deleted the [h] in the “her” and “him.”]
A Note about Speaking vs. Writing.
In writing, the pause is represented by a comma or a period, so you can think of pausing when you speak like putting a comma between your thoughts.
Sometimes, in English, in order to speak more clearly, you may just need to slow down and start pausing between thought groups.
There was a lot of information in this lesson, so listen to it several times and then listen to native English speakers communicate. You should be able to hear now how they pause between thought groups and place special emphasis on the most important words in those thought groups.
Series on Stress and Rhythm in English
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