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Topic 8. Intonation. Structure of intonation

  1. Components of intonation and the structure of English intonation group.
  2. Conversational topic: About myself
  3. Conversational topic: Characterizing people
  4. Conversational topic: Chita
  5. Conversational topic: Education in Russia
  6. Conversational topic: Family life
  7. Conversational topic: Famous Architects.

1. Intonation is a language universal. It is the highest phonological level.

Intonation is a complex, a whole, formed by significant variations of pitch, loudness and tempo (i.e. the rate of speech and pausation) closely related. Nowadays there is another term "prosody" which embraces the three prosodic components and substitutes the term "intonation". It is widely used in linguistic literature, it causes no misunderstanding and, consequently, it is more adequate.

An intonation pattern contains one nucleus and may contain other stressed or unstressed syllables normally preceding or following the nucleus. The boundaries of an intonation pattern may be marked by stops of phonation, that is, temporal pauses.

Intonation patterns serve to actualize syntagms in oral speech. The syntagm is a group of words which is semantically and syntactically complete. In phonetics actualized syntagms are called 'intonation groups'. Each intonation group may consist of one or more potential syntagms, e.g. the sentence "I think he is coming soon"

The intonation group is a stretch of speech which may have the length of the whole phrase. But the phrase often contains more than one intonation group.

According to R.Kingdon the most important nuclear tones in English and the only ones we need to distinguish in teaching are: Low Fall, High Fall, Low Rise, High Rise, Fall-Rise.

The tone of a nucleus determines the pitch of the rest of the intonation pattern following it which is called the tail.

The nucleus and the tail form what is called terminal tone. The two other sections of the intonation pattern are the head and the pre-head which form the pre-nuclear part of the intonation pattern and, like the tail, they may be looked upon as optional elements.

Generalizing we may say that minimally an intonation pattern consists of one syllable, which is its nucleus, and in this syllable there is a melodical glide of a particular sound. Maximally it consists of three other segments: the head, the pre-head and the tail.

The rate of speech can be normal, slow and fast. The parts of the utterance which are particularly important sound slower. Unimportant parts are commonly pronounced at a greater speed than normal.

Any stretch of speech can be split into smaller portions, i.e. phonetic wholes, phrases, intonation groups by means of pauses. By "pause" here we mean a complete stop of phonation.

2. Our further point will be the description of intonation in the functional level. The communicative function of intonation is realized in various ways which can be grouped under five general headings. Intonation serves:

1. To structure the information content of a textual unit so as to show which information is new or can not be taken for granted, as against information which the listener is assumed to possess or to be able to acquire from the context, that is given information .

2. To determine the speech function of a phrase, i.e. to indicate whether it is intended as a statement, question, command, etc.

3. To convey connotational meanings of "attitude" such as surprise, annoyance, enthusiasm, involvement, etc.

4. To structure a text. As you know, intonation is an organizing mechanism.

5. To differentiate the meaning of textual units (i.e. intonation groups, phrases and sometimes phonetic passages) of the same grammatical structure and the same lexical composition, which is, the distinctive or phonological function of intonation.

6. To characterize a particular style or variety of oral speech which may be called the stylistic function.

3. Notation.There are a variety of methods for recording intonation patterns in writing and we can look at the advantages and disadvantages of some of the commoner ones. The first three methods reflect variations in pitch only:

1. The method introduced by Ch. Fries (56) involves drawing a line around the sentence to show relative pitch heights:

2. According to the second method the syllables are written at different heights across the page. The method is particularly favoured by D.Bolinger (47), for example:

3. According to the third, "levels" method, a number of discrete levels of pitch are recognized, and the utterance is marked accordingly. This method was favoured by some American linguists such as K.Pike (71) and others who recognized four levels of pitch, low, normal, high and extra-high, numbering them from 1-4

4. The fourth method is favoured by most of the British phoneticians such as D.Jones, R.Kingdon, JDO'Connor and GFArnold, M.Halliday, D.Crystal and others, as well as by Soviet phoneticians who have successfully developed and improved it. This method has a number of advantages.

4. Rhythm. Rhythm seems to be a kind of framework of speech organization. Rhythm as a linguistic notion is realized in lexical, syntactical and prosodic means and mostly in their combinations. For instance, such figures of speech as sound or word repetition, syntactical parallelism, intensification and others are perceived as rhythmical on the lexical, syntactical and prosodic levels, e.g.

Speech production is naturally closely connected with the process of breathing. So speech activity as well as any other human activity is conditioned by physiological factors among others and is characterized by rhythm.

Speech rhythm is traditionally defined as recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in a speech continuum. The stressed syllable is the prosodic nucleus of the rhythmic group. The more organized the speech is the more rhythmical it appears, poetry being the most extreme example of this. Prose read aloud or delivered in the form of a lecture is more rhythmic than colloquial speech. On the other hand rhythm is also individual- a fluent speaker may sound more rhythmical than a person searching for the right word and refining the structure of his phrase while actually pronouncing it.

Phonemic functions | Теорія «двох мечів» про дуалізм світської і церковної влади


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