“It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it” is the main preoccupation of this study of English pronunciation. Pronunciation is vital to communication and is closely bound up with understanding and identity.
David Crystal presents the “mechanics” of pronunciation in detail but in a lively, intelligible manner with ample illustrations rather than in a dry, technical way.
Intonation, he sees, as “the primary organisational principle underlying spoken discourse”. The chapter on where the stress falls in words is well illustrated with the story of a South Asian woman, living in England, who went to a doctor because her husband was impotent; she put the stress on the second syllable of that word which caused the puzzled doctor to hear it as “important”.
As regards pace, “most English speakers have a natural speech rate of four or five syllables” and rhythm is “one feature of speech that explains more about English pronunciation than any other” because a change in rhythm can correlate with a change in mood, atmosphere or subject matter.
