Reuven Tsur

10

"refrectory period". There is a similar pair of back-to-back [t]s in the line "Have no delight to pass away the time". In ordinary connected speech they would be run into one another; here they are overarticulated by a stronger than usual release of the first [t], and an intervening 175- msec pause. Again, the pause is perceived as an articulatory gesture, and by no means as a pause. In addition to possible expressive functions, these back-to-back [t]s serve a conspicuous prosodic purpose: to articulate the caesura (it should be noted that in figure 5, the caesura is articulated by a conspicuous terminal contour (after "summer"), not the back-to-back [s]s).

ma deglorioussummerbythissun ofYork Figure 5Wave plot and pitch contour of "Made glorious summer by this sun of
York"

In isolation, a word cannot begin with a vowel; it must be preceded by a "glottal stop". Glottal stop is the speech sound we insert before "aim" when we say: "I said 'an aim', not 'a name'". In connected speech, the preceding word is usually run into the word-initial vowel, and the glottal stop is omitted. Likewise, when a word ends with an oral stop ([p], [t], [k], [b], [d], or [g]), it consists, in theory, of three stages: the speaker closes the vocal track; this is followed by a minute period of silence, while the vocal track is closed; this may be followed by a "stop release", when the vocal track is opened, and a short plosion is heard. This plosion results from "the release of occluded breath". In connected speech, the word is usually run into the next one, and the word-final stop release is suppressed. I have quoted above Gerry Knowles who suggests that, since glottal stops and stop releases are usually suppressed, in instances when they are properly articulated, they may indicate discontinuity, even where there is no measurable pause.
Consider, for instance, the verse line "But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes", from Shakespeare's first sonnet. A native speaker of English would normally suppress all the glottal stops and stop releases in a phrase like "thine own bright eyes". Rhythmically, "bright" constitutes a deviation: it is a stressed syllable in a weak position, that is, where the iambic pattern requires an unstressed syllable. My perception-oriented theory of metre predicts that such a verse line can be performed rhythmically without demoting the deviating stress, by having recourse to a certain combination of vocal strategies, one of them being overarticulation. Indeed, the Marlowe Society, in their full recording of Shakespeare's Sonnets, insert (even emphasize) a glottal