Beyond Repeat After Me by Yoshida Marla;

Author:Yoshida, Marla;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TESOL Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Last Thursday / I went to the supermarket / and bought some vegetables. /

Last / Thursday I / went to / the supermarket and bought / some / vegetables. /

It’s easy to see that the first sentence is divided more naturally. Its pauses break the sentence up into logical parts that each have both a grammatical structure and a chunk of meaning. These groups of words that are divided by pauses are called thought groups. In contrast, the parts of the second sentence seem random and just don’t make sense.

In reality, not everyone breaks up thought groups in the same way. When people talk faster, they will probably pause less often and use fewer thought groups; slower speech leads to more pauses and more thought groups. In more formal language, such as when someone is giving an important speech, the speaker often uses more pauses. These can be a valuable tool for the speaker to draw the listeners’ attention to important points. The speaker’s own style and personal preferences can also affect how often he or she pauses.

In spite of these individual differences, we can make some generalizations about thought groups and how they are divided. Thought groups have these characteristics:

A thought group has pauses or almost-pauses before and after it. We pause between thought groups, but not within them. A pause might not be a complete stopping of sound. Instead, it might just be a slowing or lengthening of the last stressed syllable of the thought group (Murphy, 2013).

A thought group contains one prominent element. This is the word that receives the most emphasis in that thought group. (More information about prominence begins later in this chapter.)

Each thought group has its own intonation pattern. That is, the speaker’s voice goes up and down in a “melody” for that stretch of speech. Because of this, thought groups are sometimes called intonation units. (There’s more about intonation in Chapter 11, “Intonation.”)

A thought group usually has its own grammatical structure. It’s often a phrase, a clause, or a whole sentence—a chunk of language that feels like it has its own structure and expresses a thought or a unit of meaning (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010).

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