Breath Group

Chapter 1: Breath groups and speech units

Growing accustomed to English speech: breath groups, thought groups and speech units

I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face

I've Grown Accustomed to her Face is a song that's particularly useful in learning the rhythm, stresses and intonations of English because it's very similar to spoken English in many ways. In fact, it was written especially for Rex Harrison, who had a very small range of notes that he could sing. So he kind of “spoke” the song. Lerner and Loewe who wrote the song for the musical My Fair Lady tried to make the song as close to speech as possible, with long easy speech units and with a melody that didn't move up or down very much, with note intervals not much more than the intonation movements of casual conversation.

In this song, each of the lines is a breath group or speech unit, some long and some short. Breath groups or speech units are the natural units of spoken English or any spoken language. They are made up of groups of words that are phrases or clauses, that are pronounced with one breath, and with one intonation contour and which have a rhythm that's inherent to the speech unit, and which also express one thought in each speech unit. To speak fluently, native speakers have to have available to them many thousands of ready-made units each of which they can pronounce as a whole unit. There is never enough time in real conversation to compose phrases or clauses or sentences out of individual words and grammatical rules. The pressure to speak fast and fluently in real back-and-forth conversation forces people to use memorized speech units.

To make their speech understandable to their listeners and to make it easier for speakers to express their thoughts simply and clearly, speakers spread out their thoughts in many different speech units that succeed each other, putting only one thought in each speech unit. The principle is according to Wallace Chafe one thought per breath group.

In each of these breath groups there is only one main stress. It comes on the last content word of each. (A content word is a noun, adjective, verb, adverb, and so on. It is shown in bold letters.)

Here's the lyrics to this song from My Fair Lady, a very popular musical show from the 1950s.

Each line of this song corresponds to a natural unit of speech in English, what we call a breath group or a thought group. And each line has “sentence stress”, the strongest stress in the breath group, on the last content word of the group. (Shown in bold letters.)

In contrast to I've grown accustomed to her face, another song that was written for another singing actor, Judy Holliday, to be very close to conversational speech is the song Just in Time by Jules Styne and Comdon and Green. Styne wanted to compose a melody that was very easy to sing, very much like speech. So, he wrote the melody in half-step note intervals, which is just about how much intonation moves up or down in easy, casual speech. The speech units in Just In Time are generally shorter than those in I've grown accustomed to her face.

Singing a Poem

William Carlos Williams was a famous American poet of the 20th century. He spent most of his life as a children's doctor for working-class people in a small town in New Jersey. His poetry was remarkable because he tried to bring into his poetry the sounds and the forms of colloquial American speech. The following poem, "Danse Russe" should be read out loud several times. Each line of the poem represents a breath group. Try to say each line and each breath group as one rhythmic unit. Put stress marks on each of the content words of each of the lines. (Sometimes for reasons of keeping a steady rhythm, pronouns or prepositions should be stressed. As in the second word of line 1.)

The last content words of each line should be given extra stress, by raising the pitch, saying it louder, or lengthening the vowel. Usually the last content word (but sometimes it’s some other content words in the breath group) is given extra stress because it's the most important piece of new information in the line.

After you have marked the stresses and the rhythms of all the breath groups, repeat the entire poem several times with your instructor. Then, replace the unstressed syllables with “da”s and the stressed syllables with “Dum”s and put a heavy curved line over the extra stressed syllable. The pattern will look like this for the first 4 lines:

da-Dum da-da-Dum da-Dum-da

da-da-Dum da-Dum-da

da-Dum-da

da-da-Dum da-da-Dum-da-Dum

Then your instructor will start to chant the da-da-Dum patterns. Try to follow along with the da-da-Dum patterns of the poem with your kazoo, singing and lengthening the stressed syllables.

Damn, damn, damn, damn!

I've grown accustomed to her face

She almost makes the day begin

I've grown

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