Cruttenden (2014)

Language has features of length, pitch and loudness. The features of

pitch, length and loudness may contribute to patterns which extend over larger
chunks of utterance than the single segment and when used thus re called
suprasegmental, or prosodic.
Pitch is used to make differences of tone in tone languages, where a
syllable or word consisting of the same segmental sequence has different
lexical meanings according to the pitch used with it. Outside tone languages
pitch also makes differences of intonation, whereby different pitch contours
produce differences of attitudinal or discoursal meaning. While tone is a feature
of syllables or words, intonation is a feature of phrases and clauses.
Some combinations of the features of pitch, length and loudness will also
produce accent, whereby particular syllables are made to stand out from those
around them. There are a number of other prosodic features whose linguistic
use is far less understood. These include rhythm, the extent to which there is a
regular beat in speech; tempo, and voice quality, which includes both
supralaryngeal settings of the mouth and tongue and laryngeal settings
involving either the vocal cords or the larynx as a whole. Sometimes a voice
quality conveys meaning as when a creaky voice indicates boredom;
sometimes a quality is appropriate to a situation, e.g. breathy voice is known as
bedroom voice and whispery voice as library voice. (54)
Cruttenden, A. (2014). Gimsons Pronunciation of English (8th ed.). New
York, New York: Routledge.

J.C. Wells:
The prosodic or suprasegmental- characteristics of speech are those of
pitch, loudness and speed or tempo, or speech rate; its inverse is the duration
of the constituent segments-. These combine together to make up the rhythm
of speech, and are combined in turn with stretches of silence pause- to break
up the flow of speech.
To some extent prosodic characteristics are the same in all languages. It is
probably true of all human societies that speakers speed up when they are
excited or impatient and slow down when they are being thoughtful or weighty.
We all speak more quietly than normal when we do not wish to be overheard.
We all have to speak more loudly to be heard over a distance or in noisy
conditions unless, of course, we can use modern technology to transmit and
amplify the signal for us-.

But it is clear that different languages also regularly differ in their prosodic
characteristics. Simple transferring the prosodic patterns of ones mother
tongue or L1 to a foreign language or L2 such as English- contributes to
making you sound foreign, and may quite possibly lead your being
misunderstood by other speakers.
Stress is realized by a combination of loudness, pitch and duration. Some
languages use stress placement lexically. [...] Other languages do not use
stress lexically.
In English there are a few pairs of words distinguished just by stress, for
example billow and below or import noun- and import verb-. However, the
English habit of weakening unstressed vowels means that most pairs of words
differing in stress often also have differences in their vowel sounds, so that the
distinction is not carried by stress alone. Nevertheless, English is, like Greek, a
stress language: stress is an important part of the spoken identity of an English
word.
Tone is anther prosodic characteristic, being realized mainly by
differences in the pitch of the voice. A high pitch results from the relatively rapid
vibration of the vocal folds in the larynx, a low pitch from a relatively slow
vibration. An acceleration in the rate of vibration is heard as a rising pitch, a
slowing down as a falling pitch. In a level pitch the vocal folds vibrate at a
constant rate. (3)

Wells, J. C. (2006). English Intonation: An Introduction. United Kingdom,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hadumod Bussmann
Prosody: Linguistic characteristics such as stress, intonation, quantity,
and pauses in speech that concern units greater than the individual phonemes.
Prosody also includes speech tempo and rhythm. (962)
Stress: In the narrow sense, a suprasegmental feature which, together
with pitch, duration, and sonority, makes up the prominence of sounds,
syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. Articulatory characteristic increased
muscular activity. Acoustic characteristic: increase in intensity (volume). In the
broad sense (also accent), the syntagmatic prominence of a linguistic element.
(a) Two basic types of stress are dynamic stress (=dynamic accent,
expiratory accent, stress accent) and musical stress (=pitch accent).
Dynamic stress is achieved through intensified muscle activity during
articulation (e.g. word accent in English), musical stress through change or

distribution of pitch over one or more linguistic elements (e.g. Swedish,

Classical Greek). These two types actually occur together, with one or the other
being predominant. (b) According to the prosodic unit affected, a distinction is
drawn between syllable stress, word or word group stress, and sentence stress.
These units can carry (c) primary (=main), secondary, or weak stress, i.e.
varying gradations of emphasis. (d) A further distinction is drawn with regard to
the regularity of occurrence: fixed stress refers to those languages in which
stress always or almost always occurs on a particular syllable (e.g. the initial
syllable in Czech, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and Finnish, the penultimate
syllable in Polish, the final syllable in French), and thereby marks word
boundaries; free stress is found in Germanic languages (generally on the root
syllable), Russian, Bulgarian, Spanish, and Italian. In free-stress languages,
stress can be used to distinguish between different lexemes (blckbird vs blck
brd), different parts of speech (prsent vs presnt), or different grammatical
categories (Ital. canto I sing vs cant he/she/it sang). Stress can have a
significant diachronic influence on sound change: cf. the exceptions to the
Germanic sound shift, elucidated in Verners law, which resulted from the
ProtoIndo-European free stress. (1127)
Intonation: In the broad sense, all prosodic characteristics of a linguistic
utterance that are not tied to a single sound. Since intonational features are an
overlay on the segmentable individual sounds, they are also called
suprasegmental features. Three aspects are involved in the description of
intonation phenomena: (a) stress2 (=accent) through emphasis placed on a
syllable (often accompanied by an increase in volume); (b) pitch; and (c)
pausing which can be described only in relation to stress and pitch. Intonation
can affect a particular syllable, a word, a phrase, or a sentence. (591)
Quantity: Prosodic characteristic of speech sounds that so far has only
been physically measured in approximate values, since objective parameters
for boundaries between individual speech sounds cannot be ascertained owing
to the fact that speech proceeds in an uninterrupted flow. While the absolute
duration of speech sounds depends on the speech tempo and ones personal
way of speaking, the relative duration may function to differentiate meaning, for
example in English the opposition of long and short vowels (e.g. heed vs hid)
that is accompanied by qualitative characteristics. Three distinctive qualities are
found, for example, in Estonian. Long and short consonants as well as long
and short vowels are found, for example, in Greenlandic: [ma:'n:a] now,
[mana] this, [u:'nq] burn [un:'q] leather, [a:'naq] stepmother, [anaq]
excrement. Long consonants (geminates) can also be differentiated from short
ones in that they are formed when pulmonic (or in the case of ejectives,
pharyngeal) air is forced with great pressure through the resonance chamber.
(974)

Pause: 1 Brief interruption of the articulatory process between consecutive

linguistic units such as sounds, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases, and
sentences. Pauses are suprasegmental features. (871)
Bussmann, H. (1998). Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. New York,
Newyork: Routledge.
OALD:
(phonetics) the part of phonetics which is concerned with stress and
intonation as opposed to individual speech sounds. (1220)
Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (8th ed.). (2010). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ACTION RESEARCH:
Research is a means to action, either to improve your practice or to take
action to deal with a problem or an issue. Since action research is guided by the
desire to take action, strictly speaking it is not a design per se. Most action
research is concerned with improving the quality of service. It is carried out to
identify areas of concern, develop and test alternatives, and experiment with
new approaches.
Action research seems to follow two traditions. The British tradition tends
to view action research as a means of improvement and advancement of
practice (Carr & Kemmis 1986), whereas in the US tradition it is aimed at
systematic collection of data that provides the basis for social change (Bogdan
& Biklen 1992).
Action research, in common with participatory research and
collaborative enquiry, is based upon a philosophy of community development
that seeks the involvement of community members. Involvement and
participation of a community, in the total process from problem identification to
implementation of solutions, are the two salient features of all three approaches
(action research, participatory research and collaborative enquiry). In all three,
data is collected through a research process, and changes are achieved
through action. This action is taken either by officials of an institution or the
community itself in the case of action research, or by members of a community
in the case of collaborative or participatory research. There are two focuses of
action research:
1. An existing programme or intervention is studied in order to identify possible
areas of improvement in terms of enhanced efficacy and/or efficiency. The
findings become the basis of bringing about changes.
2. A professional identifies an unattended problem or unexplained issue in the
community or among a client group and research evidence is gathered to justify

the introduction of a new service or intervention. Research techniques establish

the prevalence of the problem or the importance of an issue so that appropriate
action can be taken to deal with it.
Kumar, R. (2011). Research Methodology: A step-by-step guide for
beginners (3rd ed.). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

A research approach which is an on-the-spot procedure designed to deal

with a concrete problem located in an immediate situation. This means that a
step-by-step process is constantly monitored over varying periods of time and
by a variety of mechanisms (e.g., OBSERVATION, INTERVIEW,
QUESTIONNAIRE, DIARY STUDY, and DISCOURSE ANALYSIS) so that
ensuing feedback may be translated into modifications, adjustments, directional
changes, redefinitions, as necessary, so as to bring about lasting benefit to the
ongoing process itself. Action research involves action in that it seeks to bring
about change, specifically in local educational contexts. It is usually associated
with identifying and exploring an issue, question, dilemma, gap, or puzzle in
your own context of work. It is also research because it entails the processes of
systematically collecting, documenting, and analyzing data and it is participatory
and collaborative in that teachers work together to examine their own
classrooms. Action research is a generic term for a family of related methods
that share some important common principles. The most important tenet
concerns the close link between research and teaching as well as the
researcher and the teacher. It is conducted by or in cooperation with teachers
for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of their educational
environment and improving the effectiveness of their teaching. Thus, the
enhancement of practice and the introduction of change into the social
Tavakoli, H. (2012). A Dictionary of Research Methodology and Statistics
in Applied Linguistics. Iran, Tehran: Rahnama Press.