20. The components of utterance prosody and units of its analysis.

PitchThe pitch component of intonation or speech melody is the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place with voiced sounds. It is present in every word (inherent prominence) and in the whole sentence, because it serves to delimit sentences into sense groups, or intonation groups. The delimitative (con­stitutive) function of melody is performed by pitch variations jointly with pausation, be­cause each sentence is divided into intonation groups (on the auditory and acoustic level) or into sense groups (on the semantic level).

To describe the melody of an utterance it is necessary to determine the relevant pitch levels, pitch ranges, directions and rate of pitch movement in each intonation group.The pitch I e v e I of the whole utterance (or intonation group) is de­termined by the pitch of its highest—pitched syllable. It shows the degree of semantic importance the speaker attaches to the utterance (or intonation group) in comparison with any other utterance (or intonation group), and also the speaker's attitude and emotions.

The number of linguistically relevant pitch levels in English has not been definitely established yet: in the works of different phoneticians it varies from three to seven. In unemphatic speech most phoneticians distinguish 3 pitch levels: low, mid and high. These levels are relative and are produced on different registers depending on the individual peculiarities of the voice.

The pitch range of an utterance is the interval between its highest-pitched syllable and its lowest—pitched syllable. According to cir­cumstances the speaker changes his voice range. It may be widened and nar­rowed to express emphasis or the speaker's attitudes and emotions. For example, if "Very good" is pronounced with a narrow (high) range it sounds less enthusiastic. Pronounced with a tow narrow range it sounds sincere, but not emotional. If said with a wide range it sounds both sincere and enthusiastic.Most phoneticians distinguish three pitch ranges - wide, mid and nar­row.The rate of pitch variations may be different depending on the time, during which these variations take place, and on the range of the variations. Differences in the rate of pitch variations are semantically important. When the rate of the fall is fast, the falling tone sounds more categoric and definite than when the rate of the fall is slow.

The basic unit used to describe the pitch component is the ton e. De­pending on whether the pitch of the voice varies or remains unvaried tones are subdivided into kinetic and static. Static tones may have dif­ferent pitch level of the voice — the high static tone, the mid static tone, the low static tone. The differentiation of kinetic tones as high falling and low falling, high rising and low rising, etc. is also based on the differentiation of the pitch level of their initial and final points.As to the direction of pitch movement, kinetic tones are subdivided into simple and complex. Simple tones are unidirectional: the falling and the rising tones. Complex tones are bidirectional: the falling—rising tone, the rising-falling tone, and the rising-falling-rising tone. Rhythm An essential feature of connected speech is that the peaks of prominence - the stressed syllables - are inseparably connected with non-prominent syllables. The latter are attached to the stressed syllables, they never exist by themselves. The simplest example of a close relationship between the stressed and unstressed syllables is a polysyllabic word-utterance which is a phonetic and semantic entity incapable of division, Thus an utterance is split into groups of syllables unified by a stressed syllable, i.e. stress-groups, each of which is a semantic unit - generally a word, often more than a word.

An important feature of English pronunciation is that the prominent syllables in an utterance occur at approximately equal periods of time. It means more or less equal time for each of the stressed groups:

I'd 'like to 'give you a 'piece of ad`vice.When the number of syllables in adjacent stress-groups is not equal, the speed of utterance will be the highest in the group having the largest number of syllables and, vice versa, the tempo is noticeably slower in a group having fewer syllables. Thus the perceptible isochrony of stress-groups is based on the speakers tending to minimize the differences in the length of stressed groups in an utterance.

Thus it has been shown that stress in English performs an important function of 'organizing' an utterance, providing the basis for its r h у t h m i с structure which is the realization of rhythm as a prosodic feature of speech.

Rhythm is defined in different languages in largely the same terms. The notion of rhythm implies, first of all, a certain periodicity of phonological events. For an English utterance these events, as has been made clear, are the stressed syllables. Such a periodicity is a peculiarity of English. English speech is therefore often described as more 'rhythmic' than, for example, Russian.

It follows that the units of the rhythmic organization of an utterance are stress-groups, which may be as well called rhythmic groups.

22. The structure of a prosodic contour (intonation group) in English. The functions of its elements. SUPRAPHRASAL UNITIES

The view of a text as 'built up' by utterances has been enriched in modern linguistics by introducing a “hierarchy” of text constituents. The higher units are formed by grouping utterances into complexes, or sets, each occupying a certain 'slot' in the semantic structure of the text. The unit coming next to an utterance in the above-mentioned hierarchy is a supraphrasal unity (SPU).The identification of a supraphrasal unity in spoken language is achieved primarily with the help of prosodic features. This makes it possible to speak of the prosodic structure of a supraphrasal unity. First of all, there are constant prosodic markers distinguishing initial, median аnd final phrases in the unity. These are the features of pitch, loudness and tempo. It has been proved, in particular, that the pitch of the onset syllable in an initial phrase is noticeably higher than that in the following phrases, the decrease of the pitch-height being gradual in many cases. The same tendency is observed for the degree of loudness. The tempo of speech tends to be somewhat slower at the beginning and end of the supraphrasal unity and faster in the middle.An important feature marking the boundary of a supraphrasal unity is a pause which is considerably longer than any of the pauses separating the phrases within the unity. It is the so-called three-unit pause.The degree of semantic completeness of the utterances within a supraphrasal unity is reflected in the degree of finality of its nuclear tone. The last utterance in a unity normally has a falling nuclear tone with the lowest ending point (Mid Wide Low Narrow Fall) while the fall in the non-final phrases doesn't generally reach the bottom of the voice-range (a falling tone with a not-low ending, e.g. the High narrow Fall, the Mid Narrow Fall). There is a rather higher probability for non-falling tones (Low Rise, Fall-Rise) in the initial and medial phrases than in the final phrase of a unity.Due to the specific prosodic markers an utterance isolated from a supraphrasal unity is easily recognized as 'contextual'. Besides the features referred to above, this repression depends on the accentual pattern, which is very often 'marked', i.e. characterized by a shift of prominence from its normal position. The placement of the nucleus in such a phrase can only be justified by a larger context.

Division of Utterances into Intonation-Groups

Analysis of English utterances into intonation-groups shows that they are co-extensive with a stretch of speech of various grammatical nature: an independent sentence, a principal or a subordinate clause, two or even more clauses, a group of words or even one word. Co-extensiveness with a sentence is typical of only a small portion of speech material (about 17 %, according to experimental data). An intonation-group corresponding to a grammatical sentence is marked by specific characteristics of tone, stress and duration, serving to express semantic completeness and independence — the relevant features of an utterance. An intonation-group of this kind is defined as a simple tune.Most grammatical sentences are prosodically expressed by a combination of intonation-groups. These combinations have a specific function of a double nature: on the one hand, they present information in the form of relatively separate semantic items, and on the other hand, they make up a communicative whole (entity) out of these separate parts. Utterances which are composed of more than one intonation-group form a combined tune.Some sentences lend themselves to be subdivided more readily than others. Long sentences, most naturally, break up into smaller parts in spoken language. Their division is based both on physiological convenience (an intonation-group is normally a breath-group) and on the complexity of information being conveyed, e.g.:

After a long boring wait | I eventually boarded my plane.

Of the two factors - physiological convenience and complexity of information - semantic reasons are overriding in importance. Through intonation division the speaker can make several items stand out as more or less independent parcels of information in a short utterance, too, increasing thereby the general prominence of the utterance,

Nobody | could deny it.Another major characteristic involved is the syntactic structure of an utterance. The number of intonation-groups in utterances of the same length may often vary precisely because of the peculiarities of their syntactic structure, which may either presuppose prosodic division as an obligatory feature or, vice versa, 'forbid' it, or else (as a third and most frequently occurring variant) allow of two options: with or without an intonation boundary between the constituents of a sentence.

Prosodic division is typically optional in expanded simple sentences with adverbial modifiers of different kinds, complex sentences with object, relative or attributive clauses and some others. The grouping of words within a message into longer or shorter sections and the placement of an intonation boundary in such cases is largely a matter of the speaker's semantic interpretation of an utterance, as well as his communicative intention. As a result the same written sentence read aloud by different people may have a different number of intonation-groups.Often the number of intonation-groups is the same, but the location of their boundaries varies. E.g.:

Los Angeles | is well known | for both the high level of its air pollution | and the efforts made to control it.

Los Angeles is well known | for both the high level of its air pollution | and the efforts | made to control it.

An intonation boundary is obligatory, or, at any rate, highly probable in complex sentences with subordinate clauses of condition, cause, time (in pre-position to the principal clause), concession, result, comparison (particularly, when there is an adverbial modifier of manner in the principal clause) and some others. E.g.:

Since you refuse to help, | I must do it alone.

In spite of the rain and bitter cold | they all came in time.

Strictly speaking, there is no rule forbidding a pause in any place within an utterance (cf. the so-called hesitation pauses), but from the point of view of syntactical predicta­bility certain positions in an utterance display a very small probability of a break. Thus, e.g. the subject of a sentence expressed by a personal pronoun is but seldom separated from the predicate; a preposed attribute is usually closely linked to the noun, etc.

The choice of a number of intonation-groups in an utterance also depends on the type and form of speech. In a dictation, for instance, an utterance is divided up into smaller sections than in any other kind of reading, and spontaneous speech is characterized by uneven length of intonation-groups, and their boundaries are less predictable from the syntactic structure than in reading aloud.