F 2 Low Narrow Low Wide all

Mid Narrow '"Mid Wide

Н i^h .N ап^-о\у High Wide

Rise

.High Narrow

Mid Nan'ow ''Mid Wide'"-

Low Narrow Low Wide-

Rise-Fall

Fall-Rise

'—High Wide _ Hiph Narrow-

-Mid Wide Mid Narrow

— Low Wide ^ yf Low Narrow-Д^

S

tatic and kinetic tones differ in form and in their function in speech.

Static tones give prominence to words. In general, the degree of prominence is proportional to the pitch-height of the static tone: the higher varieties are usually associated with greater prominence, which, in turn, signifies greater semantic importance.

Kinetic tones are more significant to the utterance. Besides giving prominence to a word, kinetic tones perform a number of other functions pertaining to the overall communicative meaning of an utterance. They

4. indicate the communicative type of an utterance;

5. express the speaker's attitude towards the subject-matter, the listener and the situation;

6. single out the centre of new information in an utterance or the point of greater semantic importance as viewed by the speaker.

It's easy to notice that the functions of static and, especially, kinetic tones largely overlap with the functions of intonation as a whole, which testifies to the role of the pitch component and of the tones, in particular, as the most active elements of intonation.

Because of their communicative relevance kinetic tones are virtually indispensable for the prosodic organization of speech: practically any utterance / intonation-group has a kinetic tone*.

The total number of tones (static and kinetic) in an utterance or part of it forming a separate intonation-group is determined by the number of important (prominent) words, and most typically there are from 1 to 5 tones.

The tone carried by the most important word (which is generally the last notional word) is called the nuclear tone. The nuclear tone may be called terminal, since it is always the last tone in an intonation-group and serves as its boundary marker.

* The so-called level, nuclear tone is regarded in this book as one of the functional variants of the rising tone.

126

NON-SEGMENTAL PHONETICS

The term tone should be distinguished from the term tune, which is used to refer to the pitch pattern of the whole intonation-group. It is obvious that the notion of tune is wider than that of tone and the tune may comprise several tones while a tune of a minimal size coincides with a tone realized in a monosyllabic utterance, e.g.:

⁴No. /Well. ^vHere.

The stressed and unstressed syllables within the tune are distinguished according to ±eir position and function in the tune.

Unstressed or partially stressed syllables which precede the first full stress (the onset) form the p r e h e a d . The portion of the tune extending from the first stressed syllable up to, but not including, the nuclear syllable is referred to as the h e a d. It nsists of any number of stressed or unstressed syllables (at least one of the former). The syllable bearing the nuclear (terminal) tone is called the nucleus of the utterance, istressed or partially stressed syllables following the nucleus are called the tail. The number of the component parts in a tune may vary. The only indispensable element of a tune is the nucleus. The other components may or may not be present in a tune. It depends on the length of the utterance, the phonetic structure of the words nosyllabic or polysyllabic) and the number of prominent words in it.

Ear-Training