Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

A Cross-Varietal Comparison of Deaccenting and Given Information: Implications forInternational Intelligibility and Pronounciation TeachingAuthor(s): Ee Ling LowSource: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 2006), pp. 739-761Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40264306Accessed: 24/08/2010 19:10

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A Cross-Varietal Comparison of Deaccenting and Given Information: Implications for International Intelligibility and Pronounciation Teaching EE LING LOW Nanyang Technological University Singapore

Previous research has established that old or given information is often deaccented. The assumption is that unimportant information ought to be weakened and attenuated in speech. Consequently, given informa- tion is often deaccented and new information is usually accented in most varieties of English. However, some nonnative varieties, such as Singapore English (SE) appear not to deaccent given information. The present article seeks to investigate the apparent absence of deaccent- ing in SE by attempting a cross-varietal comparison with British English (BE). The data comprise three main categories of given information: repeated lexical items, anaphoric reference, and sentences that cue deaccenting by inference. Results indicate that SE speakers showed no acoustic evidence of prosodically attenuating given information unlike their BE counterparts and that in the informational domain, SE does not appear to have a comparable prosodie means of signaling new and given information. Implications are given for the international intelli- gibility of nonnative varieties of English that do not distinguish between new and old information via differences in accent placement. This article will also discuss ramifications for pronunciation teaching.

Previous research has established that old or given information is

often deaccented (Bolinger, 1986; Couper-Kuhlen, 1986; Cruttenden, 1997, 2006; Eefting, 1991; Hawkins & Warren, 1994; Wennerstrom, 2001). The notion of givenness incorporates two key elements in English, semantics and prosody. Semantically, givenness can be under- stood as an extension of Grice's (1975) rules of conversational interaction. Grice outlines four conversational maxims: quantity (do not make your contribution more informative than is required), quality (be truthful),

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 4, December 2006 739

relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief). In particular, the maxims of quantity and relevance assume that less important information ought to be weakened and attenuated in some way. One way to do this is through prosody. Thus, in English, given information is often deac- cented, and new information is usually accented.

Connecting semantic function and prosody is common. Halliday (1967) links accent placement to informational focus. Halliday defines new information as information that is irrecoverable from preceding dis- course. New information is often accented, and old or given information tends to be deaccented. Later researchers have defined gLvenness and new- ness from several different perspectives. Chafe (1976) says that the distinc- tion between newness and givenness must consider the speaker's ability to correctly predict what is in the addressee's consciousness. Defined within that context, old information is knowledge that the speaker assumes to be in the addressee's consciousness at the time of the utterance. Allerton (1978) defines givenness in terms of the hearer's ability to recover old information either textually (from preceding discourse) or situation- ally (by taking into account the speaker's memory of past events) .

The precise acoustic correlates of givenness and newness have been the subject of much debate. Bolinger (1965) suggests that in English, what is informationally important is highlighted or made prominent usu- ally by raising or lowering its pitch from a relatively constant pitch line compared with surrounding syllables, and while what is considered unim- portant is cast in the shadow. For example, in the sentence / amf*1, the word cold is highlighted because it is produced at a higher pitch than the pre- ceding words. To give an example of a given item that is not prominent, if a speaker responds to a preceding statement made such as: / amœM by replying / am™1 cold, the word cold in the reply is not given prominence because it is produced at roughly the same pitch line as the other non- highlighted words in the sentence. This nonprominence occurs because the word cold has just been mentioned in the preceding statement.

The acoustic correlates of signaling new and given information seem to be related to the amount of cognitive load needed to process infor- mation, which determines the amount of physical effort that a speaker has to expend to help the listener process the information. Chafe (1994) purports that, because high pitched items are physically easier for listeners to hear, new information is often produced with greater acoustic energy and is especially marked by higher pitch. Chafe (1976) states that given information is pronounced with lower pitch and weaker stress compared with new items because the speaker assumes them to be in a listener's consciousness, thus requiring less cognitive effort to process. Fowler and Hossum (1987) suggest that the acoustic correlate of given information is the shorter duration of words containing old information. This lack of prominence in given information seems to

740 TESOL QUARTERLY

be relative. Wennerstrom (2001, p. 38) discusses relative deaccenting of given items in relation to surrounding items and indicates that given information need not have the lowest pitch in the entire discourse; it just has to be lower in pitch than its surrounding syllables.

Although it is not always easy to specify what discoursal structures correlate with givenness, Cruttenden (2004, p. 5) states that one unar- guable case of givenness appears to be that of repetition. He states that deaccenting of repeated items is certainly obligatory for the vari- ety of English that Halliday (1967) was describing, that is, standard British English (BE) and for most other dialects of English. However, this may not be true for other varieties. Research on Hawaiian English (Vanderslice & Pierson, 1967), Indian English (Gumperz, 1982; Bansal, 1990), Nigerian English (Egbe, 1979), and London Jamaican English (Wells, 1992) suggests that such a phenomenon may not occur in these nonnative varieties of English. Although the terms native and normative are terminologically loaded in regard to varieties of English, in this article, native varieties refers to Kachru's (1982) inner circle varieties: British, American, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian English. All other varieties, which cannot be assumed to use the same prosodie features to signal givenness and newness, are termed nonna- tive varieties.

The contrast between an apparently obligatory need to deaccent given information by native English speakers and the lack of such a need by nonnative English speakers is of interest to English language teachers, as it is important to find out whether the lack of deaccenting attested in the nonnative varieties of English poses problems for intel- ligibility when native speakers and nonnative speakers of English communicate.

The absence of deaccenting associated with other nonnative varie- ties of English also characterises Singapore English (SE). A previous perceptual and acoustic study carried out by Low (1994) suggests that although BE speakers deaccented lexical items which have been previ- ously mentioned in an utterance, such deaccenting seems to be absent in SE. This observation was supported by acoustic evidence. It was found that while most of the BE speakers tested produced a step-down in peak fundamental frequency (F0), which is the acoustic correlate of pitch, and which is from the previous syllable for repeated lexical items in the corpus, SE speakers uniformly exhibited a step-up in peak F0 from the preceding syllable for these items. The current study investigates further the apparent absence of deaccenting in SE and discusses the implications of the findings for the international intelli- gibility of those varieties of English that do not prosodically distinguish between new and old information in the same way as the native varie- ties. The ramifications for pronunciation teaching are also explored.

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 741

METHOD

Three categories of discoursal structures thought to correlate with givenness, and thus to elicit deaccenting, were examined: verbatim repetition (Cruttenden, 2006), anaphoric reference or anaphoric dis- tressing (Cruttenden; Ladd, 1980), and inferential reference (Ladd). Each of these will be described in turn.

The sentences containing verbatim repetition were termed Category 1 test items. The test sentences chosen were cited by Bolinger (1957) as common examples of deaccenting repeated items and accenting new items. An example of a Category 1 sentence is If you have a hun- dred dollars then spend a hundred dollars. Category 2 items consisted of sentences that contain anaphoric pronouns referring to something that has been mentioned earlier in the sentence. An example Category 2 sentence is Jim likes green walls but his wife prefers them blue, where them is coreferential with walls. According to Deterding (1994), function words tend to be accented in SE. Thus, this category is used to inves- tigate whether the function words will be deaccented in this context. Category 3 was meant to cue deaccenting by inference as described in Ladd (1980), where "the deaccented noun has been somehow referred to or alluded to earlier in the discourse" (p. 180), for example, / went to the shop to buy Mars Bars but they 'd totally run out of chocolate bars. In this sentence, the chocolate in chocolate bars implicitly refers to the choc- olate in Mars Bars and is thus susceptible to deaccenting by inference. The test sentences were randomized with four filler sentences. (A full list of the sentences is given in the Appendix.) It should be pointed out that the test items represent only three easily identifiable catego- ries of given information. The study has not attempted to cover all the categories of given information. Consequently, the experimental results should also be interpreted with a degree of caution because the care- fully controlled nature of the data may not directly represent naturally occurring speech.

PROCEDURE

BE speakers were recorded in the sound-treated room at the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge using a Sennheiser condenser microphone with a cardioid response. To ensure that the recordings would not be clipped, the distance from the speakers' mouths was varied according to the amplitude of their voices displayed by the peak level signal bar. The SE speakers were recorded in the teaching laboratory of the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Although the room is not entirely sound treated, it is equipped for

742 TESOL QUARTERLY

recording purposes, specifically, for video-recording trainee teachers during practical training sessions. A Sony TC-172 cassette recorder with an attached microphone was used.

Sentences were produced in isolation, that is, out of context, and all were declaratives. Thus, they were expected to be produced with falling nuclear tones (O'Connor & Arnold, 1973, p. 53). In SE, as reported in Low and Brown (2005), declaratives generally also have falling tones.

Participants

Ten SE and ten BE speakers (five males and five females for both varieties) matched for educational qualification (all were undergradu- ates) and age (19-25 years old) were recorded. BE speakers were either born or brought up in the south of England to control for regional variation of accents, and the Singaporeans were all ethnically Chinese and had not spent more than a year living away from Singapore. The 120 test utterances (6 sentences produced by 20 speak- ers) was digitized using waves+ software running on the Silicon Graphics machines at the Phonetics Laboratory at Cambridge University.

Fundamental Frequency (F0)

In Low's (1994) study of deaccenting, peak F0 was used, including the peak F0 of the syllable immediately preceding those containing given information and the peak F0 of all the test items containing given information. In the present study, peak F0 was measured for all the syllables in the utterance. This procedure was necessary to exam- ine the overall intonational pattern of the utterances. For this reason, the F0 measurements are given in Hertz instead of in any perceptually meaningful measurement because I am interested in the comparative overall pitch pattern between the varieties. The F0 measurements were taken by aligning the waveform display with the F0 contour for each utterance using waves*. The peak F0 value of each syllable was deter- mined using Cooper and Sorensen's (1981) criteria. The purpose of these criteria is to locate the highest F0 value for a given syllable while excluding the occasional spurious F0 values which occur "in regions of speech accompanied by very low amplitude or in regions of fast F0 transition such as at the onset of voicing after a stop consonant" (p. 17). When spurious F0 values were encountered, a direct measurement of fundamental period was obtained manually by examining the

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 743

narrow-band spectrogram display of that portion, identifying the value of a higher harmonic, for example, H3, and dividing this value by 3, that is, the number.

Analysis

Because the test sentences contained examples of different syntactic conditions hypothesized to cue the presence of deaccenting, a com- mon means of classifying the results for each category was needed. One way is to identify the last accented syllable in the utterances for the BE speakers. This syllable is then termed the nucleus. The following syllables would then form the tail of the utterance. Figure 1 shows the measurement points for the nucleus and tail in a schematized repre- sentation of a sentence produced by a BE speaker.

An average peak FO value can then be calculated for all the syllables in the tail by totaling the FO values for all syllables in the tail and dividing this value by the number of syllables in the tail. It was possible to divide the phrase-final accent pattern information into the nucleus and the tail for test items in Categories 1 and 3. For test items in Category 2, however, the nucleus occurred in phrase-final position; that is, it followed the item to be deaccented, at least in BE. For Category 2 items, the peak FO of the item containing the given infor- mation was compared with the preceding unstressed syllable rather than with the nucleus following it.

RESULTS

Pitch

In the current study, it was predicted that because all the sentences in the corpus are statements, a falling intonation contour would occur at the end of each utterance. According to the literature, BE (Low & Brown, 2005) and SE (Pike, 1945) have falling tones for declaratives. It was also predicted that BE speakers would deaccent given informa- tion in the utterances, with a clear step down in average peak FO from the nucleus to the tail.1 SE speakers were predicted to exhibit a less

1 It should be noted that the terms nucleus and tail are used with reference to their posi- tion in BE. Having identified these positions in BE, the same reference points were then applied to the SE data. For convenience, the terms nucleus and tail will be used for the descriptions of both BE and SE. Note, however, that no assumption is being made that the nucleus or tail occurs in the same place in both varieties of English, or that SE actu- ally has a nuclear accent comparable to that in BE.

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FIGURE 1 Schematic Illustration of Measurements Taken

Note. The diagram depicts the FO contour as predicted for British English.

clear step down in FO or even a step up. In sentences produced by BE speakers where the nucleus occurred in final position and no tail could be found, for example, in Category 2 test items, it was predicted that there would be a step down in average peak FO from the preced- ing syllable to the given item(s). SE speakers were expected to exhibit a less obvious step-down or a step-up.

The peak FO for each syllable was measured for each of the 120 utterances. Average peak FO was then calculated for male and female speakers separately because males and females are known to have dif- ferent pitch ranges. The results for each category of sentences section are presented separately.

Figure 2 shows the peak FO results obtained for sentences in Category 1 for SE and BE speakers. Results for males and females in both SE and BE showed a similar decrease in FO between the nucleus and tail. It is also clear that there is a much steeper step down in FO from the nucleus to the tail for BE than for SE. A £-test (paired samples for means) showed that this difference was significant for males (p < 0.01, df = 14, t = -28.18) and females (p < 0.01, df = 14, t = -6.36).

Figure 3 presents the peak F0 results for test items in Category 2. Although male and female BE speakers exhibited a step down in peak F0 to the given item, the male SE speakers behaved differently from their female counterparts. The male SE speakers produced a step up in F0 from the preceding syllable to the given item. Female SE speak- ers showed a step down in F0. The difference between male BE and male SE speakers was significant (p < 0.01, df = 9, t = -8.14). For the female BE and SE speakers, the difference was not significant (p > 0.01, df = 9, t = -0.4).

Figure 4 shows the peak F0 results for SE and BE for test items in Category 3. Once again, a similar trend may be observed for SE

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 745

FIGURE 2 Peak FO Results for Repeated Lexical Items in Category 1 for Male and Female Participants

and BE speakers. In both BE and SE, the speakers produced a step down from the nucleus to the tail. However, BE speakers show a much steeper slope downward to the tail than do SE speakers. The difference was significant for both the male (p < 0.01, df = 4, t = -5.7) and the female speakers (p < 0.01, df = 4, t = -2.97). In other words, SE speakers exhibited a significantly gentler step down in average peak FO from the nucleus to the tail than did BE speakers.

FIGURE 3 Average Peak FO for Test Items in Category 2 for Male and Female Participants

Note. PS = preceding syllable. These graphs have been plotted on a different scale to accommodate smaller values.

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FIGURE 4 Peak FO Results for Test Items in Category 3 for Male and Female Participants

Duration

Pitch is not the only acoustic clue to newness and givenness. According to Fowler and Hossum (1987), significantly shorter durations were found for the second mention of words in a passage, where they defined given information as those words that had been mentioned previously in an utterance. Hawkins and Warren (1994) have pointed out that this approach provides good experimental control and is useful for acoustic measurements because it enables the researcher to com- pare the same words in an utterance, even though it does somewhat simplify the distinction between new and given information. Finding out whether SE speakers attenuated their production of old words dura- tionally required utterances in which a word was repeated. In the data, this criterion applies to sentences in Category 1, where lexical items are repeated at the end of the utterance.

It was predicted that BE speakers would clearly shorten the duration of given or old words relative to that of new words. SE speakers were expected to exhibit less difference in duration between new and old words in the data.

Duration measurements were taken for the vowels within each syl- lable of all utterances. The total vowel durations for each word were calculated. The decision to measure vowel durations was prompted by Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000), who showed that SE was found to have more nearly equal vowel durations than BE because of the relative absence of reduced vowels in SE compared with BE. Vowels were identified by processing the speech data, sampled at 16 kHz with the

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 747

spectrographic analysis (s-gram) of waves+ set to wide band. For a detailed account of vowel segmentation criteria, see Low et al. (2000, p. 381).

Figure 5 presents the durational results for new and old words in Sentence 1. The figure shows that although SE showed almost no dif- ference in the vowel duration of new and given words, BE clearly showed a shorter duration for given words. A J-test (two samples assum- ing unequal variances) showed that the difference in vowel duration of new and given words in SE was not significant (p > 0.01, df = 17.97, t = 0.72). The difference in BE, however, was found to be significant (p< 0.01, df = 17.97, t = 3.41).

Figure 6 shows the average vowel durations for test items in Sentence 2. Again, SE showed almost no difference between the vowel durations of new and given words. BE, on the other hand, showed a considerably larger difference in vowel duration for new and given words. A /-test showed that the difference between the vowel durations in new and given words in BE was significant (p < 0.01, df = 17.97, t = 2.57). This difference was not found to be significant in SE (p > 0.01, df = 17.97, t = 0.19).

Figure 7 shows the average vowel durations for test items in Sentence 3. The difference in duration that SE speakers assigned to new and given words was not significant (p > 0.01, df = 17.97, t = -0.26), but

I K.I Rl 5

Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence // you liave a hundred dollars, then spend a hundred dollars

748 TESOL QUARTERLY

I ICI RK6

Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence / had a toothache, hut fortunately, it wasn't a had toothache

the difference that BE speakers assigned was significant (p < 0.01, df = 17.97, t = 5.45).

The durational results for all sentences support the predictions. BE subjects clearly shortened their production of given items. SE speakers, however, did not shorten duration in their production of given words.

DISCUSSION

The average peak F0 results suggest that both SE and BE speakers attenuate their production of given items. This is evident in the step down in F0 from the nucleus to the tail for test items in Categories 1 and 3. However, SE speakers also exhibited less of a step down in F0 than the BE speakers. For test items in Category 2, SE subjects did not uniformly exhibit a step down to the given items; instead, the male subjects assigned a step up in F0 to the given item.

The duration measurements show that BE speakers clearly shortened the duration of vowels in given words. However, SE speakers did not exhibit a significant difference in duration between the vowels in new and given words. This finding suggests that SE speakers do not use duration to attenuate given information in the way BE speakers do.

The F0 and the duration results seem to contradict each other. The F0 results suggest that SE speakers attenuate their production of given

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 749

ik;i rk 7

Average Duration of Vowels in New and Given Words in the Category 1 Sentence / won't give it to John because I know John

items (albeit to a lesser degree than BE speakers), but the duration results suggest that SE speakers do not attenuate their production of given items. One possible explanation for this apparent contradiction is that the findings for deaccenting may be a function of the FO meas- ure chosen. In other words, SE may not, in fact, deaccent in the domain of FO. The apparent deaccenting, measured as an average FO value for all syllables in the tail, may be misleading because vital infor- mation such as the shape of the FO contour for the syllables in the tail is lost. This information was examined to determine whether SE speakers actually deaccented or reaccented their production of given items.2 Figure 8 shows why the apparent deaccenting may in fact be an instance of reaccenting of given information.

The FO results showed that the step down in FO from the nucleus to the tail was much greater in BE than in SE. In Figure 8, the steep slope for BE is schematized as the result of a flattening of the FO contour on the postnuclear syllables. Additionally, Figure 8 shows two possible reasons for SE's smaller step down in FO. First, the smaller

^he term reaccenting is used by Cruttenden (2006) to refer to the placement of accent after the intonational nucleus. In other words, it refers to those languages which do not flatten their pitch contour after focus but seem to have postfocal accents. The use of this term for SE in the current study refers specifically to what happens to the pitch contour in SE after the intonational nucleus as designated by BE speakers has been realized.

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FIGURE 8

Why Attenuation in SE May Be an Instance of Reaccenting

step down in FO could be an instance of deaccenting, just as in BE, where the FO contour flattens out. Second, it may be the case that SE reaccents given information, which is shown in the second hump fol- lowing the nucleus.

Thus, in order to find out whether SE has deaccented or reaccented given information, it may be insufficient to look at the averaged FO values for all syllables in the tail. By averaging the postnuclear syllables, it is impossible to tell whether SE assigns (a) a step up in FO to the given item or (b) a step-down to the given item, as in BE. The next section will investigate whether SE speakers deaccented or reaccented given information.

SHAPE OF FO CONTOUR

Method

The FO results for both males and females were combined because little difference was found in the overall trend displayed in their FO patterns for test items in Categories 1 and 3. The results for Category 2 are not be presented because the values of the preceding syllable and given item were already shown. Although peak FO values for all

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 751

syllables in the tail were measured because the structure of the tail varied across the different sentences, it was necessary to identify the common syllables that could act as reference points for comparing across the sentences. The FO measurements of the following syllables were presented where possible: 1. The nucleus, denned as the last accented syllable in BE. 2. The syllable preceding the given item (PS). The FO value for this

syllable relative to that of the nuclear syllable can show whether SE speakers assigned a step up or a step down to the given item.

3. The given item. 4. The final syllable (FS). This syllable is important as a reference to

show how the FO contour ended for each utterance.

Although the nucleus and the given item were identifiable for all sentences, it was not always possible to identify the PS and the FS.

Results

In this section, the results of the FO measurements points in the tail for SE and BE are presented using one sentence each from Categories 1 and 3.

Figure 9 shows the FO values for Sentence 2 in Category 1. Once again, the SE speakers exhibited a step up in FO to the given item, and the BE speakers showed a step down. This finding suggests that the SE speakers did not deaccent the given items in this sentence. The higher peak FO on -ache for SE could be a result of the SE speakers assigning an accent on -ache as well, but this cannot be ascertained from the results shown in Figure 9.3 The accompanying FO trace for an SE and BE speaker producing the phrase bad toothache is given in Figure 10. Portions of the FO trace corresponding to the syllables pre- sented in Figure 9 are marked.

From Figure 10, it is clear that the BE speaker deaccented tooth- and the FO contour flattens out after the nucleus bad, but that the SE speaker appears to have reaccented tooth- by assigning it a slight step up and has apparently accented -ache as well. This finding explains the results obtained in Figure 9, where the peak FO on -ache is slightly higher than for -tooth.

Figure 11 shows the FO results for Sentence 1 in Category 3. The BE subjects clearly deaccented the given item choc-, but the SE subjects

3 The assignment of accent on -ache is not surprising considering the findings in Low (2000), where SE speakers stressed the second element of compound words.

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FIGURE 9 SE and BE Speakers Producing the Category 1 Sentence / had a toothache but fortunately, it

wasn 't a bad toothache

Note. FS = final syllable.

exhibited a step up in FO. Once again, the data suggests that SE reac- cents given information. Example FO traces of individual SE and BE speakers are provided in Figures 12a and 12b.

Figure 12 shows that although SE speakers clearly assigned a step-up to the given item choc-, the BE speakers did not do so. Furthermore, evidence shows that the SE speakers reaccented after the nucleus out, a relatively large FO discontinuity characterises the succession from of to choc-. In BE, however, the FO contour flattens out after the nucleus on out.

In summary, it is fair to conclude that although the average FO results appear to suggest that SE attenuates given information to some extent, this attenuation does not take the form of deaccenting. Rather, from the example sentences shown in Categories 1 and 3 and the accompanying FO traces of these sentences, sufficient evidence is provided to show that SE speakers, in fact, reaccented given information.

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY

According to Fowler and Hossum (1987), speakers sometimes signal old or given information in a lexical item by shortening the duration of the items. This result is confirmed by the BE speakers in this study. Although Fowler and Hossum were not able to show a lowering of peak FO for given information in American English, the current study

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 753

FIGURE 10 F0 Traces of SE Speaker and BE Speaker Producing bad toothache

shows that the BE speakers consistently lowered peak F0 to signal given information. This result concurs with Chafe (1976), where given information was produced with lower pitch. The current findings sug- gest that, for BE, both lowering of peak F0 and shortening duration on given items are salient acoustic manifestations of speakers' attempts to prosodically attenuate given information.

SE speakers appeared not to prosodically attenuate given informa- tion, either in terms of duration or F0. In the informational domain, SE does not appear to have a comparable prosodie means of signaling new and given information. This finding presents interesting questions pertaining to the intelligibility of SE for global communication. In fact, the need to establish international intelligibility was the theme of Singapore's 2001 Speak Good English Movement and articulated in

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FIGURE 11 SE and BE Subjects Producing the Category 3 Sentence / went to the shop to buy Mars Bars but

they'd totally run out of chocolate bars

Note. PS = preceding syllable, FS = final syllable.

the words of Singapore's current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong (then the deputy prime minister): "We need not speak with a British or American accent, a Singaporean accent is fine. But Singaporeans must speak a form of English that is readily understood by people all over the world" (Baruah, 2001).

Jenkins (2000) says that contrastive stress placement is key to a speaker's intended meaning and crucial for ensuring intelligibility. She further emphasizes that "contrastive stress is especially important in English, as the language does not have the morphological or syntactic resources that many other languages have to highlight contrasts" (p. 153). Consequently, she suggests that nuclear stress placement and production ought to occupy an important place in the lingua franca core (LFC), and indeed, her LFC lists nuclear stress production and placement and division of speech stream into word groups as core features. Seen in this light, the findings from the current study have important implications for the international intelligibility of nonnative varieties of English that do not distinguish between new and old infor- mation via differences in accent placement.

Given that Singaporeans do not deaccent but in some instances reac- cent given information, a basic question is whether this way of speaking causes a problem for intelligibility. To answer this question, we need to consider broadly what constitutes intelligibility. Smith and Nelson (1985) reserve the term intelligibility to refer to the ability to recognize words and utterances, and they use the term comprehensibility to refer to the meaning conveyed by the words and utterances; they define interpretability as the ability to deduce the speaker's intent behind

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 755

FIGURE 12 FO Traces of SE Speaker and BE Speaker Producing out of chocolate bars

the utterance. It is hard to imagine anyone not being able to recognize an utterance (i.e., intelligibility) spoken by an SE speaker simply because of the reaccenting of given information. In fact, reaccenting old information in SE appears to have the opposite illocutionary force compared with what it is meant to convey in BE, that of drawing a speaker's attention to given information rather than away from it. A more plausible hypothesis is that interpretability will be compromised. Though the current study did not consider this aspect of intelligibility, current research from the corpus of spoken Singapore English (National Institute of Education Corpus of Spoken Singapore English; see Deterding & Low, 2001) suggests that the SE speaker's reaccenting of old information causes a British interlocutor in at least a few instances to misunderstand the SE speaker's communicative intent (Deterding, Brown, & Low, 2005). Anecdotally, a compromise in interpretability

756 TESOL QUARTERLY

makes sense. In cases where I merely reaccented repeated words, for example, / looked around for the car but there was no car, I have often been asked by foreigners whether I was angry when my communicative intent has been far from conveying the feeling of anger.

The other interesting question to consider is what other discoursal means Singaporeans may use to convey the same communicative intent of distinguishing between new and given information. The answer probably lies in the use of pragmatic particles (also known as discourse particles) described in Low and Brown (2005, pp. 175-180). For exam- ple, to highlight new lexical items, SE speakers can use the particle lah as in It's the man lah, I tell you, it's him, where man is highlighted by the use of the /adjust after it (Low & Brown, 2005, p. 178). As for downplaying given or old information, the particle what may be used. For example:

A: Why do you play the piano? B: I like, what.

This conversational exchange shows an example where the earlier information is not referred to via the use of an anaphoric pronoun (as in the Category 2 test items used in this study) but is instead replaced by the particle what. From these examples, we can surmise that SE does distinguish between new and old information but in a different manner from BE. BE prosodically accents new information and deaccents given information, but SE highlights new information by adding the lah particle after the lexical item containing new infor- mation and using the what particle to refer to something that has been mentioned earlier in the conversation.

Moving on to pedagogical implications, we have to consider whether the language of the students is simultaneously Singaporean enough to inspire national pride while still being international enough to keep Singapore in the mainstream of the English-speaking world. A quintessential feature of SE such as the lack of deaccenting does not compromise international intelligibility but, rather, international interpretability, especially when one is communicating with native English speakers. However, if Singaporeans are negotiating for busi- ness deals or political agreements with nonnative-English-speaking countries that also do not practice deaccenting (for examples, see Cruttenden, 2006), then misinterpretability will not be an issue. I recommend that a syllabus on pronunciation teaching should include aspects of nuclear and contrastive stress placement, but also that it should highlight features that differ from native varieties as differ- ences and not errors. At the same time, how the student's own variety of English conveys the same discoursal intent should also be high- lighted and not ignored. An effective way highlight discoursal intent

IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL INTELLIGIBILITY 757

would be to design conversations that would cue the presence of deaccenting in native varieties of English and to ask speakers of non- native varieties to produce these conversations. The teacher can also encourage the pupils to paraphrase the conversations with their own words as long as they keep the context exactly the same. The teacher can then observe how students make distinctions between new and given information and, if possible, use this information for classroom instruction.

CAVEATS AND DIRECTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

The present research has a few limitations. Although it was impor- tant to the experimental design to devise carefully constructed sen- tences that would cue the three different types of given information under investigation, namely, through the mention of repeated lexi- cal items, anaphoric reference, and by inference, this procedure incurs certain opportunity costs. First, the sample size of 120 sen- tences is small and therefore, the findings should not be overgen- eralized. Second, reading the sentences also suffers from a degree of artificiality and may not represent naturally occurring conversa- tion. Further research on the topic should aim to collect more natu- ral sounding data that would still be able to elicit the examples the types of given information. One production task that is useful for such purposes is the map task, where two speakers are presented with a map that differs in only one key landmark. Finding out which landmark is different requires them to communicate with each other.

The other obvious limitation is that although the participants were speakers of two different varieties of English, namely SE and BE, no attempt was made to allow these speakers to communicate with each other in order to examine whether the differences in the means and extent to which the two varieties signal new and given information actually lead to any breakdowns in communication (cf. Jenkins, 2000). Such data would be useful in contributing toward a deeper under- standing of the impact that phonetic differences between different varieties may have on actual discourse. This data, in turn, would sug- gest how much emphasis a pronunciation teacher should place on the topic.

Finally, using SE to represent a nonnative variety and BE to repre- sent a native variety also overgeneralizes from the broader classes of native and nonnative varieties that BE and SE belong to. It should also be noted that there exist different ways of establishing prominent dis- tinctions apart from just pitch or durational variation. The next logical

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step would be to extend the investigation of the link between deao centing and given information to many more varieties of English spo- ken around the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper was partially funded by the research project RI 01/3 LEL: Theoretical speech research and its practical implications, awarded by the Academic Research Fund Committee of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

THE AUTHOR

Ee Ling Low (PhD, Cambridge, U.K.) is concurrently appointed the Sub-Dean of Degree Programmes, Foundation Programmes Office, and an associate professor of English language and literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her articles on speech rhythm and stress have appeared in such internationally refereed journals as Language & Speech.

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APPENDIX

Category 1 Sentences: Repeated Lexical Items 1 If you have a hundred dollars, then spend a hundred dollars. 2 I had a toothache but fortunately it wasn't a bad toothache. 3 I won't give it to John because I know John.

Category 2 Sentences: Anaphora 1 Jim likes green walls but his wife prefers them blue. 2 I adore penguins as they're cute.

Category 3 Sentences: Inference 1 I went to the shop to buy Mars Bars but they'd totally run out of chocolate bars.

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