It is understandable now why we have to follow the requirements of Council of Europe directions in speaking English:
as listeners, to identify words and expressions used by native speakers of the (regionally coloured) standard variants of English (RR Polite Scottish, Irish, General American and Australian) and by non-native speakers whose speech, though also regionally coloured, approximates to those norms;
as speakers, to produce spoken English which is readily intelligible both to native speakers and non-native speakers who approximate to standard norms.
A note is made that regional variants differ mainly in vowel colouring whereas the consonant system is relatively uniform and stable.
Let us now summarize the language-specific use of prosodic features in English and Russian, i.e. compare the prosodic settings of the two languages.
Firstly, though on average the pitch range applied by English speakers is close to the one of the Russian speech, the English pitch range includes lower pitch level as well. Indeed, the pitch level applied by an English speaker depends on their social status: the higher it is, the lower pitch level they use.
Secondly, Russians speak louder than the English and make fewer pauses, these pauses being longer though.
Thirdly, the languages differ in the forms of their basic tonic contours as well. For instance, the English falling tones are steeper and end on a lower pitch level than they do in Russian. On the other hand, the rising tones in the English language start on a lower pitch level and have a gentler slope than in Russian.
Finally, the typical scales of the Russian and English languages have their peculiarities, too. The basic English Stepping scale (emotionally neutral speech) is characterized by level tone movement in the stressed syllables and placing the following unstressed ones on the same pitch level as the stressed syllables.
By contrast, the corresponding emotionally neutral Russian scale is pronounced with a sharp tone rise in the stressed syllables followed by lowering the pitch level of the unstressed ones.
4. New trends in English intonation
"Are you asking me or are you telling me?" was the title of the paper written about fifty years ago.
Contrary to the general expectations some speakers of English use a rising tone in statements and wh-questions. Alan Cruttenden (1968) commented on the Northern Irish incidence of a rise in statements calling his paper "the myth of a fall". Australian young people also tend to raise their pitch at the end of statements. And, finally, there are similar cases of rises mentioned by J.C. Wells (1982), D. Bolinger (1998) and D.R. Ladd (1996), all concerning American speech.
This is what David Crystal writes in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language": "Why is it used? Why should a statement end with an intonation pattern which would normally be associated with the function of a question?" (Crystal 1995:249). The author then presents the findings of a sociolinguistic study in Australia and New Zealand (based on D. Britain & J. Newman 1992):
Women used it twice as much as men.
Teenagers used it 10 times more often than people over 20, and people in the 20-30 age group used it 5 times as much as those over 70.
Working-class people used it three times as much as middle-class people.
Ethnic minorities used it 2 to 3 times more often than members of the majority group. Maori speakers, for example, used it up to 50 per cent more than Europeans.
Many authors suggest the following explanation:
high rising tone is used as a natural and widespread feature of conversational interaction. A speaker might introduce it for any of several discourse reasons — as an informal check to see if the listener has understood, as a request for empathy or some other form of feedback, or even as an indication that the speaker has not yet finished speaking (Crystal 1995:249).
D.R. Ladd also views the incidence of a rise as an asking-for-feedback device. Ladd claims that the speaker is making a statement but at the same time is asking for feedback from the listener, as if asking "Do you follow me?"
Two other contexts are transaction-openers and answers to WH-questions:
A: I have an appointment with DrMac,millan. B: What's your ,name ? A: William Jarvis.