We can break down intonation two main structural components:
Prominences
Boundaries
Prominences are prominent syllables—the ones that stand out the most.
Boundaries are the edges of intonational phrases—the places where one IP ends and another begins. (As we saw on the previous page.)
You likely already have fairly strong intuitions about prominences and boundaries. Even if you don’t yet have a mastery of American English intonation, if you understand spoken English well, you have at least some degree of receptive understanding of the way prominences and boundaries work in English.
For example, in the following audio clip, which words stand out to you as prominent?
If you heard the words discovered, perfect, and poison as being prominent, then you’re picking up on the correct cues.
Let’s try another. In the following, which words stand out to you as prominent?
If you heard the words carry, cheeses, train, and late as being prominent, then you’re correct—they’re exactly the ones a native speaker would identify as well.
Here’s one more. What stand out as prominent here?
If you heard anybody, pride, and work as being prominent, good job! Those are what a native speaker would likely choose.
Don’t worry too much if you didn’t perfectly identify the prominences in these examples. For one thing, there won’t always be perfect agreement even among native speakers on which syllables are prominent—some cases are borderline. For another, we’re just at the beginning! The pages that follow will train your ears and teach you how to identify and reproduce prominence in spoken English exactly as native speakers do. But hopefully you can draw some encouragement from the realization that you are already attuned to many of the cues we use to signal prominences and boundaries in English!
On the next page, we’ll start to get into what it is exactly that makes words and syllables sound more or less prominent. To do that, we need to talk about stress!