12th International Conference on Educational Studies and Applied Linguistics

The present study attempts to find out the distinctiveness of juncture(pauses within words, phrases and sentences) in English and central Kurdish. Juncture is the relationship between one sound and the sounds that immediately precede and follow it. It is a morphophonemic phenomenon with double signification , a suprasegmental phoneme which changes the meaning and is important for phonological descriptions of languages. The aim of this study is to see how juncture affects the meaning of words , phrases and sentences. Slow or rapid speech can also determine the use of juncture which marks the break between sounds and the phonological boundary of words, phrases or sentences. However, the ambiguity of meaning resulting from the placement of juncture can be solved by context. Stress placement on certain words also affects the use of juncture and leads to a change in meaning. In this study, English and Central Kurdish junctures were identified within words, phrases and sentences. Based on the data collected and presented, it was found out that juncture in English is distinctive at all levels , namely , simple words, phrases and sentences .In Central Kurdish, however, juncture is distinctive in compound words and sentences. As for the sentence level, because Kurdish is an agglutinative language, there are cases where the pause or juncture is closely related to the morphological structure of the words and the personal clitics and prefixes added to the end. As for the implications of the results in the field of practice , teachers must take these into consideration while teaching stress , intonation and other aspects of connected speech.