7

Lecture 6-7. Intonation

1. Suprasegmental Phonology.

2. Intonation as a complex semantic unity. Different approaches to the definition of intonation. Functions of intonation.

3. System of English intonation. Structure of intonation on the acoustic and perceptual levels. Components of intonation (speech melody, utterance stress, rhythm, tempo and pausation, loudness, timbre).

4. Intonation group as a meaningful unit. Types of intonation groups.

5. Different systems of graphical notation of intonation.

6. Studies of intonation in communicative phonetics.

Basic Notions

Intonation – a complex unity of speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm and voice timbre, which enables the speaker to express his thoughts, emotions and attitudes towards the contents of the utterance and the hearer.

The intonation group (syntagm, sense-group, intonation contour, tone-group, tune, tone-unit) – a linguistic unit hierarchilly higher than the rhythmic unit.

A rhythmic (accentual) unit – either one stressed syllable or a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it.

Clitics – the unstressed syllables in the rhythmic unit.

Enclitics – the unstressed syllables that follow the stressed syllable or the nucleus of the rhythmic unit.

Proclitics – the unstressed syllables that precede the stressed syllable of the rhythmic unit.

Syntagm – the phonetic entity, which expresses a semantic entity in the process of speaking and thinking and which consists either of one rhythmic group or of a number of such groups.

The pitch – the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place with voiced sounds.

The pitch level – shows the degree of semantic importance the speaker attaches to the utterance in comparison to the other utterance, and the speaker’s emotions.

Intonation contours – the sequence of pitch phonemes in pronouncing an intonation group.

The speech range – the interval between its highest-pitched syllable and its lowest-pitched syllable

Utterance stress – the special prominence given to one or more words in an utterance.

Accent – combines stress and pitch prominence, i.e. acoustic features of intensity and fundamental frequency.

The accentual structure of words – is constituted by the occurrence of syllables with different degrees of special prominence in different positions in relation to the beginning, middle and end of words.

Tempo – the rate at which utterances and their smaller units are pronounced.

Key Problems of the Lecture

1. Suprasegmental Phonology.

Phonology of suprasegmental units is called prosodemics, or intonology. It establishes the system of prosodemes and discovers those prosodic features that have a differential value in a language. Prosodemics, or intonology has led in recent years to new approaches to phonology such as metrical and autosegmental theory.

Metrical phonology is a comparatively recent branch of phonological theory in which great importance is given to larger units than phonemic segments. It was introduced as a hierarchical theory of stress. Metrical phonology now covers the whole domain of syllable structure and phonological boundaries. There is, for example, considerable interest in the patterns of strong and weak syllables.

Another area of major interest is the rhythmical nature of speech and the structure of the foot: metrical phonology attempts to explain the reasons of the stress shifts in word, namely due to the context, giving alternations like thir^|teen but ^|thirteenth ^|place.

The autosegmental approach sees phonology as comprising several “tiers”, each one consisting of a linear arrangement of segments. They are linked to each other by association lines which indicate how they are to be co-articulated. Originally devised to handle tonal phenomena, the autosegmental approach has been extended to deal with other features whose scope is more than one segment, especially vowel and consonant harmony.