21. Rhythm as a linguistic notion. English speech rhythm. Types of rhythmic units. Guidelines for teaching English speech rhythm.

Rhythm has been defined as regularity or periodicity in the occurrence of a particular phenomenon in an utterance. English is considered to be mostly a language with stress-timed character. Stress-timed rhythm presuppose that utterance stress serves as a basis of the rhythmical organization of speech and that stresses segment the speech continuum into units of more or less equal length.

In speech, the type of rhythm depends on the language. Linguists divide languages into two groups: syllable-timed like French, Spanish and other Romance languages and stress-timed languages, like Germanic languages English and German. In a syllable-timed language the speaker gives an approximately equal amount of time to each syllable, whether the syllable is stressed or unstressed and this produces the effect of even rather staccato rhythm. In a stress-timed language the rhythm is based on a larger unit than syllable. Though the amount of time given on each syllable varies considerably, the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit is practically unchanged. The stressed syllables of a rhythmic unit form peaks of prominence.

The stressed syllable is the prosodic nucleus are called proclitics, those following the nucleus are called enclitics.

22. Utterance stress, its types and problems of classification. Nuclear tones in the system of English intonation.

Utterance stress is the special prominence given to one or more words in an utterance. On the auditory level the special prominence is achieved by pitch, loudness, length and quality. Acoustically, utterance stress is determined by variations of fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and format structure. The effect of utterance stress is created not by a single acoustic parameter, but by the interaction of different parameters. The subsystem of utterance stress in English includes the following basic types: nuclear stress (marked by a kinetic tone), non-nuclear full stress (often marked by static tones) and weak stress (syllables are not marked as a rule as they are not stress.) The distribution of stress in an utterance depends on the following factors: semantic (which determines the placement, type and degree), singles out the utterance semantic center by this or that nuclear, or primary stress, carries the greatest semantic importance, grammatical (grammatical structure of the utterance also predetermines its accentual structure) and rhythmical (the distributions of stress in an utterance is also affected by the rhythmical laws of English.) All these factors are closely linked, the semantic factor being the most important.

The nucleus and the tail form what is called terminal tone. The two sections of the intonation pattern are the head and the pre-head which form the pre-nuclear part of the intonation pattern.

The pre-nuclear part can take a variety of pitch patterns. Variation within the pre-nucleus does not usually affect the grammatical meaning of the utterance, though if often conveys meanings associated with attitude or phonetic styles. There are 3 common types of pre-nucleus: a descending type in which the pitch gradually descends to the nucleus; an ascending type in which the syllables form an ascending sequence and a level type when all the syllables stay more or less on the same level. Generalizing we may say that minimally an intonation pattern consists of 1 syllable, which is its nucleus, and in this syllable there is a melodically glide of a particular sound. Maximally it consists of 3 other segments: the head, the pre-head, and the tail

Two more pitch parameters which can considerably modify the pitch contour of the pitch-and-stress structure are pitch ranges and pitch levels of the whole intonation pattern or of each of its sections.

The pitch range of a whole intonation unit is in fact the interval between the highest-pitched and the lowest-pitched syllable. Pitch levels may be high, medium, and low. In should be noted that the more the height of the pitch contrasts within the intonation pattern the more emphatic the intonation group sounds.

The parts of the intonation pattern can be combined in various ways manifesting changes in meaning: the High Head combined with the Low Fall, the High Fall, the Low Rise, the High Rise, the Fall Rise in the phrase “Not at all”.

The number of possible combinations is more than a hundred but not all of them are equally important. Some of them do not differ much in meaning, others are very rarely used. That is why in teaching it is necessary to deal only with a very limited number of intonation patterns, which are result of a careful choice.

23. Phonostylistics as a branch of phonetics; its interaction with other linguistic disciplines. Extralinguistic factors causing phonetic modifications in speech. Phonetic styles, the problem of their definition and classification.

Phonetics studies the sound system of the language, that is segmental phonemes, word stress, syllabic structure and intonation.

Phonostylistics is a rapidly developing and controversial field of study though a great deal of research work has been done in it. This is a new branch of phonetics. It is rather a new way of looking at the phonetic phenomena.

24. Main prosodic peculiarities of the conversation phonostyle. Intonation of dialogues and monologues. (Speak on the attitudinal function of intonation in the conversational style and the use of emphatic complex tones. Provide examples)

Conversation are 1 of the most complex forms of human behaviour. A conversation consists of more than a verbal language. In a conversation we do not just listen to words, we derive the meaning consciously or unconsciously from number of other communicative systems and it could be that a lift of an eyebrow, a twitch at the side of the mouth, or silence tell us more than a dozen sentences. But undoubtedly the verbal part of the communication plays a very important role and has its own systems too but only linked with other effective ways contributed by the speakers.

The main features of the conversational style are:

1. Firstly, talks of this kind are characterized by the inexplicitness of the language as the speakers rely very much upon the extralinguistic factors – context, kinesics etc. The manifests itself in “incompleteness” of many utterances as the context makes it clear what was meant by the speaker.

2. Conversations are characterizes by the lack of planning and the randomness of subject matter. They are very often unpredictable.

3. “Non-fluency”. Informal spontaneous conversation is characterized by a high proportion of “errors” involving hesitation phenomena, slips of the tongue and all sorts of overlapping and simultaneous speech.

Some more important characteristics should be mentioned here. Entire range of vocalic clusters, sounds, non-verbal signals are common in conversation, e.g. mmmm, sshh, ah, brr, etc.

On the grammatical level informal conversation provides delimitation of utterances and sentences. The length of utterances is much more variable here than in any other variety of English. Changes in modality and status condition variations in utterance length. There is also a problem of delimiting sentences from each other as our conversations are characterizes by a large number of loosely coordinated clauses and it is very difficult to decide whether to take these as sequences or as compound sentences.

There are a few other points to be noted on the grammatical level:

1. High proportion of parenthetic compounds types of sentence introduced by you see, you know, I mean, I say and others.

2. Frequent use of interrogative sentence types and very few imperatives.

3. Common use of vocatives, especially in initial position.

4. Rare use of nominal groups as subjects; the personal pronouns are more in evidence, the informal you is quite common in its impersonal function.

5. A great number of question tags.

6. The use of all sorts of repetitions and repetition structures. Even adverbial intensifiers such as very may be repeated several times.

7. The occurrence of contrasted verbal forms. (He’s, I’ll)

8. The frequency of colloquial ellipses.

The most noticeable aspect of everyday conversations is their vocabulary. It is characterized by colloquial idioms, the use of words simple in structure, the avoidance of phraseology; also the informality of the text is achieved by the use of words and phrases specific for such conversations.

On the prosodic level the field researches provide us with data that help us to do some generalizations.

1. Conversations fall into coordinated blocks, consisting of suprasegmental and supraphrasal units tied up by variations within the length of pauses, speed, rhythm, pitch ranges, pitch levels and loudness.

2. Since there are no restrictions on the range and depth of emotions which might be displayed oin conversation speech situations they will allow entire range of prosodic effects.

3. In the description of prosodic characteristics of this intonational style we will being by saying that intonation groups are rather short, their potentially length tone units tend to be broken. These short interpausal units are characterized by decentralized stress and sudden jumps down on communicative centers.

4. As for the nuclei, simple falling and rising tones are common.

5. The tempo of colloquial speech is very varied. The natural speed might be very fast but the impression of “slowness’ may arise because of a great number of hesitation pauses both filled and non-filled within the block. However, the speakers may have no pauses between their parts, very often they speak simultaneously, interrupt each other.

6. Interpausal stretches have a marked tendency towards subjunctive rhythmic isochrony.