Intonation

Intonation is a complex unity of non-segmental, or prosodic features of speech: 1. melody, pitch of the voice; 2. sentence stress; 3. temporal characteristics (duration, tempo, pausation); 4. rhythm; 5. tamber (voice quality).

Intonation is very important. It organizes a sentence, determines communicative types of sentences and clauses, divides sentences into intonation groups, gives prominence to words and phrases, expresses contrasts and attitudes. The two main functions of intonation are: communicative and expressive.

There are two main approaches to the problem of intonation in Great Britain. One is known as a contour analysis and the other may be called grammatical.

The first is represented by a large group of phoneticians: H. Sweet, D. Jones, G. Palmer, L. Armstrong, I. Ward, R. Kingdon, J. О 'Connor, A. Gimson and others. It is traditional and widely used. According to this approach the smallest unit to which linguistic meaning can be attached is a tone-group (sense-group). Their theory is based on the assumption that intonation consists of basic functional "blocks". They pay much attention to these "blocks" but not to the way they are connected. Intonation is treated by them as a layer that is superimposed on the lexico-grammatical structure. In fact the aim of communication determines the intonation structure not vice versa.

The grammatical approach to the study of intonation was worked out by M. Halliday, The main unit of intonation is a clause. Intonation is a complex of three systemic variables: tonality, tonicity and tone, which are connected with grammatical categories. Tonality marks the beginning and the end of a tone-group, Tonicity marks the focal point of each tone-group. Tone is the third unit in Halliday's system. Tones can be primary and secondary. They convey the attitude of the speaker. Halliday's theory is based on the syntactical function of intonation.

The founder of the American school of intonation is K. Pike. In his book "The Intonation of American English" he considers "pitch phonemes" and "contours" to'be the main units of intonation. He describes different contours and their meanings, but the word "meaning" stands apart from communicative function of intonation. A. Antipova in her "System of English Intonation" characterizes the approach of the American school to the study of intonation system as "mechanical".

35 – VOPROS

Types of the English intonation

In general, linguistic distinguish several main types of English intonation. The 2 basic types are:

FALLING INTONATION

RISING INTONATION

Other types of intonation include:

High fall, low fall, fall-rise, high rise, medlevel rise, low rise.

FALLING INTONATION:

Falling intonation is the most common type of standard unemphatic intonation in English. It is used for asking and giving information in normal, quiet, unempatic style.

Sounds more categorical, confident and convincing than rising intonation. Standard falling intonation in English falls stronger and deeper than standard falling intonation in Russia.

STANDARD PATTERN:

Falling intonation is used on the last stressed syllable of the sentence in:

Statements( declarative sentence): We live in Moscow. He doesn’t have a CAR.

Special questions: Where do you LIVE?

Commands ( imperative sentence ): STOP it! Sit DOWN.

Exclamatory sentence : What a wonderful surprise!

The last part of alternative question ( after “or”): Do you want TEA or COFEE?

Tag question( When the speaker is sure that the answer will be “ yes”): You LIVE here, don’t you?( the speaker is sure and expects the answer “yes”)

RISING INTONATION

Rising intonation in English is a pretty complicated phenomenon. It can express a number of various emotions, such as: non-finality, surprise, doubt, interest, politeness, lack of confidence. Rising intonation in English is very different from rising intonation in Russian. Standard rising intonation in English first goes down a little and then up, and doesn’t go as high as the rise in Russian does.

STANDARD PATTERNs:

Rising intonation is used in:

General questions: Was she glad to SEE him?

Dependent or introductory parts of sentences: If he CALLS, ask him to COME.

The first part of alternative questions ( before “or”) : Would you like an APPLE or a PEARL?

Direct address: SIR, you dropped your NOTEbook.

Enumerating items in a list: She bought bread, cheese and tomatoes.

Tag questions ( When the speaker is not sure that the answer will be “yes” or wants your opinion):It’s a beautiful TOWN, ISN’T it? (The speaker thinks that the town is beautiful but asks for your pinion and confirmation.)

38)All speech sounds have 4 aspects (mechanisms):  - Articulatoty – it is the way when the sound-producing mechanism is investigated, that is the way the speech sounds are pronounced  - Acoustic – speech sound is a physical phenomenon. It exists in the form of sound waves which are pronounced by vibrations of the vocal cords. Thus each sound is characterized by frequency, certain duration. All these items represent acoustic aspect.  - Auditory – sound perception aspect. The listener hears the sound, percepts its acoustic features and the hearing mechanism selects from the acoustic information only what is linguistically important.  - Functional – every language unit performs a certain function in actual speech. Functional aspect deals with these functions.  In accord with these 4 aspects of speech sounds 4 branches are distinguished, each of them has its own method of investigation:  - Articulatoty phonetics - studies (investigates) sound producing mechanism. Its method consists of observing the way in which the air is set in motion, the movements of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the production of single sounds and trains of sounds. It borders with anatomy and physiology and the tools for investigating just what the speech organs do are tools which are used in these fields: direct observation, wherever it is possible, e.g. lip movement, some tongue movement; combined with x-ray photography or x-ray cinematography; observation through mirrors as in the laryngoscopic jivestigation of vocal cord movement, etc.  - Acoustic phonetics - studies the way in which the air vibrates between the speaker''s mouth and the listener''s ear. Has its basic method – instrumental. Speech sounds are investigated by means of operator called spectrograph. Intonation is investigated by intonograph. Acoustic phonetics comes close to studying physics and the tools used in this field enable the investigator to measure and analyse the movement of the air in the terms of acoustics. This generally means introducing a microphone into the speech chain, converting the air movement into corresponding electrical activity and analysing the result in terms of frequency of vibration and amplitude of vibration in relation to time. The use of such technical devices as spectrograph, intonograph and other sound analysing and sound synthesizing machines is generally combined with the method of direct observation.  - Auditory phonetics- the branch of phonetics investigating the hearing process. Its interests lie more in the sensation of hearing, which is brain activity, than in the physiological working of the ear or the nervous activity between the ear and the brain. The means by which we discriminate sounds — quality, sensations of pitch, loudness, length, are relevant here. The methods applied in auditory phonetics are those of experimental psychology: experimenting, usually based on different types of auditory tests,  - Functional phonetics – is also termed phonology. Studies the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language, how they are utilized in that language and what part they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language. So this is the branch of phonetics that studies the linguistic function of consonant and vowel sounds, syllabic structure, word accent and prosodic features, such as pitch, stress and tempo. In linguistics, function is usually understood to mean discriminatory function, that is, the role of the various elements of the language in the distinguishing of one sequence of sounds, such as a word or a sequence of words, from another of different meaning. The basic method is commutation or substitution (замены), substituting sounds in different environments.