- •16. Intonation and prosody. Prosodic subsystems; their acoustic and auditory properties. Functions of intonation/prosody and its subsystems.
- •18. Utterance stress, its types and problems of classification. The interrelation of word-stress and utterance stress.
- •19. Speech melody as a subsystem of intonation. Functions of its components. Nuclear tones in the system of English intonation.
- •20. Pausation and tempo in the structure of English intonation. Their functions.
- •21. Rhythm as a linguistic notion. English speech rhythm. Types of rhythmic units. Guidelines for teaching English speech rhythm.
- •22. Utterance stress, its types and problems of classification. Nuclear tones in the system of English intonation.
- •25. Main prosodic peculiarities of the publicistic (oratorial) phonostyle.
- •26. Main prosodic peculiarities of the academic (scientific) phonostyle.
- •27. Main prosodic peculiarities of the informational phonostyle.
- •28. Main prosodic peculiarities of the declamatory (artistic or belles-letter) phonostyle: fiction, drama, poetry.
- •31. Received Pronunciation and estuary English as a recent development of standard British English. The sociolinguistic aspect of Estuary English.
- •3 Main types:
- •32. Regional types of English pronunciation. Major differences between regional variants of English pronunciation and Received pronunciation.
- •1. Southern accents
- •2. Northern and Midland accent
- •In consonants.
- •In vowels
- •In consonants
- •In vowels
- •In consonants
- •33. American-based pronunciation standards of English. Major differences between General American and received pronunciation on the segmental and supersegmental levels.
- •Stress differences
- •Intonation differences
16. Intonation and prosody. Prosodic subsystems; their acoustic and auditory properties. Functions of intonation/prosody and its subsystems.
Intonation is a language universal. There are no languages which are spoken as a monotone, without any change of prosodic parameters. But intonation functions in various languages is a different way.
Intonation is a complex unity of a number of components, such as speech melody, utterance stress, rhythm, loudness, tempo, timbre.
The Basic Functions of Intonation/Prosody are constitutive, distinctive, identificatory.
1. Constitutive function is to form utterances as communicative units. Prosody unifies words into utterances, thus giving the latter the final form without which they cannot exist. Prosody is the only language device that transforms words as vocabulary items into communicative units – utterances. In constituting an utterance prosody at the same time performs the segmentative and delimitative subfunctions. It means that intonation segments connected discourse into utterances and intonation groups, and simultaneously delimits them one from another.
2. The distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in several subfunctions: communicative-distinctive, modal-distinctive (attitudinal), culminative (“theme-and-rheme”)-distinctive, syntactical-distinctive and stylistic-distinctive functions.
The communicative-distinctive function is to differentiate the communicative types of utterances.
The modal-distinctive (attitudinal) function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating modal meanings of utterances and the speaker’s attitudes.
The culminative (“theme-and-rheme”)-distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating the location of the semantic nuclei of utterances and other semantically important words. This function is also called logical, predicative or informational. Performing this function prosody distinguishes between what is already known and what is new in the meaning of an utterance.
The syntactical-distinctive function of prosody is to differentiate syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations in sentences.
The stylistic-distinctive functions function of prosody manifest itself in that prosody differentiates phonetic styles: informational, scientific, publicistic, declamatory, conversational, determined by extralinguistic factors.
3. The identificatory function of prosody is to provide a basis for the hearer’s identification of the communicative and modal type of an utterance its semantic and syntactical structure with the communicative situation. All the functions of prosody are fulfilled simultaneously and cannot be separate on from another. They show that utterance prosody is linguistically significant and meaningful.
17. Intonation group as a meaningful unit in speech communication. Functional parts of the intonation group and their semantic loadings. Possible types of intonation groups in English. Different systems of graphical notation of intonation.
An intonation patterns contains 1 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. 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. The intonation group is a stretch of speech which may have the length of the whole phrase. (by phrase hare we mean a sentence actualized in oral speech). But the phrase often contains more than 1 intonation group. The number of intonation groups depends on the length of the phrase and the degree of semantic importance.
Among the pitch parameters we shall concentrate on the 3 of them, the distinct variations in the direction of pitch, pitch level and pitch range. Though pitch changes are of primary linguistic significance they should be viewed together with the variations of loudness, the 2nd component of intonation, since it is clearly not possible to separate pitch and loudness in creating the effect of accentuation. That is why the 1st task is to discuss the anatomy of pitch-and- stress structure of the intonation pattern.
Not all stressed syllables are of equal importance. 1 of the syllables has the greater prominence than the others and forms the nucleus, or focal point of an intonation pattern. The nuclear tone is the most important part of the intonation pattern without which the latter cannot exist at all.