English clustering complicates life for the English language learner who comes from a CV language or from a language with more restrictive clustering
Learner errors with consonant clusters typically involve the application of compensatory strategies. The most typical compensatory strategy is deletion of one or more consonants in the cluster:
breakfast pronounced as brefas
perfect pronounced as perfec
Learner difficulties
Many ESL/EFL learners have difficulty ―closing syllables. They may adopt these strategies:
dropping the final consonant sound in the syllable, e.g., pronouncing bre instead of bread.
adding a vowel sound to the end of the syllable, e.g., hotto instead of hot.
Consonant clusters
English can have up to three initial clusters and four final clusters.
Ukrainian has up to four initial and five final
Georgian longest cluster is CCCCCCCCVC!
3. Another equally important discreet unit which can be treated at the phonetic or phonological level is syllable. Apart from phonemes and syllables, some non-segmental or supersegmental units or phenomena like word stress, utterance stress and all types of pitch patterns can also be compared.
Like the syllable and many other linguistic phenomena, word stress also belongs to near universals.
However, not all types of stress and its functions can be and are common in different structural types of languages. Though some of its functions seem to be (or in reality are) quite the same, namely: the constitutive and distinctive functions. In other words stress is of phonological nature, at least in the English and Ukrainian languages where it belongs to phonological units (like the phoneme or syllable). Its function constitute the stress patterns of words making them recognizable as certain lexical units. Cf. ‗able but ‗unable, ‗formal but form ‗ality. Hence, stress helps perform distinctive variations in words on the semantic and syllabic levels. It constitutes words of a definite meaning. Cf. ‗atom and atomic, ‗personal and personnal. Therefore, stress constitutes words identifying them and making them distinctive at the same time. For example: ‗conand ‗black ‗board; ‗dancing ‗girl and ‗dancing-girl. And in Ukrainian: workers, etc.). Only due to the change of the
distinctive stress that such words as are identified in their different meaning. Besides, word-stress helps distinguish the verb and noun in such words as ‗exsport (n) and export (v), ‗import (n) and irriport (v) or the meaning of the same Ukrainian words and several others. Apart from the purely distinctive function word stress in English and Ukrainian often performs a lexico-grammatical distinction (function), helping to identify the part of speech and express different categorical meanings. Namely:
a) case, number (plural or dual) and masculine or feminine gender of nouns as in Ukrainian;
b) case, number and neuter gender of nouns;
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c) part of speech, its case (gender), etc.: (noun, dative case) and (adjective, payment), (adj.) (noun, gen. case), (gen. case of the noun) and (future tense), (noun) (preposition), (noun in plural) and (imperative mood from).
Some words in English and Ukrainian may have parallel accentuation, i.e. they may have two different stresses in a word of the same lexical meanings. There are quite a few similar examples in Ukrainian, when one and the same word can have two different stresses. Isomorphic in some English and Ukrainian disyllabic, trisyllabic and polysyllabic words and in compounds is also the existence of one and sometimes of two primary stresses. Similarly in Ukrainian where some compounds have two stresses: The number of words with two primary stresses is considerably larger in English than in Ukrainian due to the prefixes un-, in-, dis-, sub-, ex-, under-, and others forming prominent syllables, which is not observed in Ukrainian. Besides, English disyllabic, trisyllabic and polysyllabic words have an additional secondary rhythmic accent. This phenomenon is almost alien to Ukrainian, though a weaker stress can be traced in distinctly or meticulously pronounced and some polysyllabic words. Cf. Some compound Kozak family names and geographical names have also distinct two stresses in Ukrainian: and others. In rapid speech, however, the secondary stress is optional in Ukrainian and may be used depending on the choice of the speaker who may or may not accentuate this or that syllable or part of the word. Hence, one may speak in such cases also of doublets as in the examples. Accentuation in Ukrainian, unlike English, is a very important formbuilding means used to express several morphological categories not only plural forms of many nouns but also of pronouns and case forms of numerals: a) degrees of comparison of adjectives; different forms of adverbs. Word-stress in Ukrainian may sometimes identify the lexicogrammatical nature of the word (part of speech) as in adverbs and in adjectives or verbs; b) Besides, word-stress identifies different personal verb forms and also tense forms; c) non-perfective and perfective verb forms. It should be repeated that word accent in the contrasted languages is dynamic, free and shifting. In Ukrainian, like in English, word-stress is also considered to be qualitative and
quantitative. One more isomorphic feature of English and Ukrainian word-stressig is its tendency to be in disyllabic and polysyllabic words mostly recessive or restrictedly recessive. For example:
‗worker, ‗teacher, ‗mother, ‗father, Comparing of isomorphic features and phenomena can very often be performed both with the help of the deductive and the inductive methods. The deductive method is based on logical computation/calculation which suggests all admissive variants of realization of a certain feature/ phenomenon in speech of one or of some contrasted languages.
Ukrainian word-groups of both these patterns regularly occur in speech. The deductive computation helps find some other transforms of the ANd pattern with the post-positional pronoun determiner as in the word-group nice young sisters of his or a brave deed of hers which are impossible in Ukrainian, where a prepositional pronoun or noun displays a strong objective relation.
