12. Unemphatic intonation. Sentence Stress.

Standard unemphatic falling intonation is the most common type of intonation in English. It is used in statements (declarative sentences), special questions, commands (imperative sentences), exclamatory sentences, in the first part of disjunctive questions and in the last part of alternative questions. (Different types of sentences are described in Basic Word Order in the section Grammar.) The final fall in English is used on the last stressed syllable of a sentence and falls stronger and deeper than the fall in Russian.

Statements

Special questions

Commands

Exclamatory sentences

Alternative questions

You can listen the examples of falling intonation in different types of sentences in Listening for Falling and Rising Intonation (AmE) and Listening for Intonation in Questions and Answers (AmE) in the section Phonetics.

Meaning of falling intonation – quiet, unemphatic style. At the same time, falling intonation conveys certain emotions, such as completion, finality, confidence. Falling intonation sounds more categorical, confident, and convincing than rising intonation. Compare the use of the falling tone and the rising tone in the second part of tag questions.

Tag questions

Note that the falling tone is always used in the first part of tag questions (disjunctive questions). Despite the fact that tag questions are asked to get confirmation and agreement, the answer may be affirmative or negative. (Read more about different types of questions, including tag questions, in Word Order in Questions in the section Grammar.)

High fall may be used for extra emphasis in informal situations to express lively interest and friendliness in statements, for example, in greetings and exclamations. High fall starts higher than the standard fall, and the stressed syllable on which it takes place is pronounced more loudly and has stronger stress. High fall is common in everyday speech, but language learners should use it with caution and not too often because it is very expressive and emphatic.

Change of standard patterns of falling intonation also has meaning. It is very important to understand what this change might signal.

A statement with falling intonation gives information, while a statement with rising intonation may become a surprised question or may imply a request to repeat.

A special question with falling intonation asks for information, while a special question with rising intonation usually signals more interest on the part of the speaker.

A general question with rising intonation asks for information and expects "yes" or "no" for an answer, while a general question with falling intonation usually signals the speaker's confidence in getting an affirmative answer.

A request in the form of a general question with rising intonation is normal and polite, while a request with falling intonation sounds like a command and may be impolite.

Language learners should understand what the change of standard patterns may signal, but it is advisable to use standard patterns of falling intonation in your own speech.

Sentence stress is the governing stress in connected speech. All words have their individual stress in isolation. When words are connected into sense groups (also called thought groups, i.e., logically connected groups of words), and sense groups are connected into sentences, content words keep their stress, and function words lose their stress. The most important words in the sentence receive stronger stress. The last stressed word in the sentence receives the strongest stress with the help of a fall or a rise.

13. In the USA the most widespread type of lang is GA. Like RP in GB GA in America is the social standard: it is religionally neutral, it is used by radio, by TV, in science, it is spoken by educated Americans.

1no opposition between historically long and historically short.

2[i] may be obscured as in rabbit [rэеbэt]

3[έ] – lower than the RP [e]

4[эе] – long, mostly nasaliezed, may turn into [e] as in marry, [эе] may be used instead of [a:], ask, past

5[3] - retroflex какуминальный согласный in medial and terminal position, bird, better

6[i:] – ‘barred’ препятствовать [i] in sister, horses

7[a] instead of[o], doll, rob

8[o]instead of [o:] as in law

9[Λ] turns into [3r], e.g. [h3ri] – hurry.

10in GA the distinction between monopthongs and diphthongs is not very consistent последовательный.

Principal pecularities of General American cons – s.

1. voiceless, fricative, labiovelar[ʍ]

2. the GA [r] is more sonorous than the RP [r]. It is retroflex.

3. [l] – predominantly преимущественно dark

4. [t] – short, voiced, intermediate between [d] and [t]

5. glottal stop ?

6. [h] – voiced in intervocalic position, lost initially in unsterssed or weak forms within внутри a phrase.

7. [ju] may change into [t∫, dЗ ] in due, tune

8. [∫] – vocalized in asia

9. nasal twang налет as in man.

14. Intonation is a complex unity of sentence stress, rhythm, tempo, speech melody and voice timbre. Each syllable in a sense group is pronounced on a certain pitch level and bears a definite amount of loudness. Intonation patterns serve to actualize sense groups. Intonation is a language universal. According to R. Kingdon the most important nuclear tones in English are: Low Fall, High Fall, Low Rise, High Rise, and Fall-Rise.

The sense group is a group of words which is semantically and syntactically complex.

In Phonetics actualized sense groups are called intonation groups.

Intonation patterns containing a number of syllables consist of the following parts:

the prehead

the head (the 1st accented syllable)

the scale (begins with the 1st acc.syll.)

the nucleus (the last acc.syll.) – is the most important part of the intonation pattern.

the tail – conveys no particular information

The parts of intonation patterns can be combined in various ways expressing different meanings and attitudes.

The number of possible combinations is more than 100. But not all of them are equally important. That’s why the number may be reduced to fewer combinations that are important. Thus Prof. O’Connor gives 10 important tone-groups. Each intonation group has a communicative center (a semantic center). It conveys the most important piece of information. which is usually something new. The terminal tone arranges the intonation group both semantically and phonetically.

The functions of intonation:

constitutive (it presupposes the integrative function on the one hand when intonation arranges intonation groups into bigger syntactic units: sentences, syntactic wholes and texts)

delimitative (it manifests itself when intonation divides texts, syntactic wholes and sentences units that is intonation groups).

distinctive It is realized when intonation serves:

→ to distinguish communicative types of sentences (the communicatively distinctive function)

→ the actual meaning of a sentence (the semantically-distinctive function)

→ the speaker’s attitude to the contents of the sentence, to the listener and to the topic of conversation (the attitudinally-distinctive function)

→ the style of speech (the stylistically distinctive function)

the syntactically distinctive function (one and the same syntactic unit may be divided into a different number of intonation groups. This division may be important for the meaning).

→ the function of differentiating between the theme and the rheme of an utterance.

^ The rheme is the communicative center of an utterance. The theme is the rest of an utterance.

Each component of intonation has its distinctive function.

15. Rhythm is the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is so typical of an English phrase that the incorrect rhythm betrays the non-English origin of the speaker.

The units of the rhythmical structure of an utterance are stress groups or rhythmic groups. The perception of boundaries between rhythmic groups is associated with the stressed syllables or peaks of prominence.

Unstressed syllables have a tendency to cling to the preceding stressed syllables — enclitics, or to the following stressed syllables — proclitics. In English, as a rule, only initial unstressed syllables cling to the following stressed syllable, non-initial unstressed syllables are usually enclitics.

Each sense-group of the sentence is pronounced at approximately the same period of time, unstressed syllables are pronounced more rapidly. Proclitics are pronounced faster than enclitics.

Each sense-group of the sentence is pronounced at approximately the same period of time, unstressed syllables are pronounced more rapidly. Proclitics are pronounced faster than enclitics.

Rhythm is connected with sentence stress. Under the influence of rhythm words which are normally pronounced with two equally strong stresses may lose one of them, or may have their word stress realized differently, e. g. ,Picca'dilly — ,Piccadilly 'Circus — 'close to ,Picca'dilly

Structural, semantic and sound devices for producing rhythmicality.

Phonetic devices make impression of rhythmicality and add considerably to the musical quality a poem has when it is read aloud:

1)The rhyme is the repetition of identical or similar terminal sound combination of words. Rhyming words are generally placed at a regular distance from each other.

2)The assonance occurs when a poet introduces imperfect rhymes often employed deliberatly to avoid the jingling sound of a too insistent rhyme pattern.

3)Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound at frequent intervals.

4)Sound symbolism (imitation of the sounds of animals) makes the description very vivid.

Structural or syntactical devices indicate the way the whole poem has been built, thus helping the rhythm to fulfil it`s constitutive function.

1)Repetition: poets often repeat single lines or words at intervals to emphasize a particular idea. Pepetition is to be found in poetry which is aiming at special musical effects or when a poet wants us to pay very close attention to something.

2)Syntactical parallelism helps to increase rhythmicality.

3)Inversion, the unusual word order specially chosen to emphasize the logical centre of the phrase.

4)Polysyndeton is syntactical stylistic device which actually stimulates rhythmicality of a poem by the repetition of phrases or intonation groups beginning with the same conjunctions `and` or `or`.

Semantic devices- impart high artistic and aesthetic value to any work of art including poetry:

1)Simile is a direct comparison which can be recognized by the use of the words `like` and `as`.

2)Metaphor is a stylistic figure of speech which is rather like simile, except that the comparison is not direct but implied and makes the effect more striking.

3)Intensification is a special choice of words to show the increase of feelings, emotions or actions.

4)Personification occurs when inanimate objects are given a human form or human feelings or actions.

16. Phonetics is a science devoted to the physical analysis of the sounds of human speech, including their production, transmission, and perception.

Phonetics is traditionally divided into two branches: acoustic, concerned with the structure of the acoustic signal itself, and articulatory, concerned with the way these sounds are produced.

Theoretical Phonetics studies speech sounds:

1) from every point of view.

Articulatory point of view - every speech sound is a complex of definite finely coordinated and differentiated movements and positions of the various speech organs.

Acoustic - speech sounds have certain physical properties.

Phonological - speech sounds are studied through the phonological oppositions.

Auditory - all of speech sounds have infinite number of features.

2) studies mechanisms of vowel and consonant production:

Vibrator mechanism - vocal cords

Resonator mechanism - oral cavity, nasal cavity

Obstructer mechanism - tongue, VC, teeth

Power mechanism - lungs, diaphragm

3) sounds are studied not only separately but in clusters and in speech. Thus we've come to kinetics and kinesthetic factors.

4) the matter of analysis:

- description - setting down as many as possible features which are present in sounds.

- classification - mentioning those features by which sounds utter.

One of the main subjects is intonation. Theoretical phonetics views it from the point of view of different schools and approaches:

Russian - intonation consists of speech melody, tones, change in pitch.

British - intonation is a contour, that is a unit of intonation consisting of pre-head, head, nucleus and tail.

American - intonation is pitch. Differences in pitch cause differences in meaning.

Speaking about sounds we usually view them in words, which consist of syllables. This is another subject of theoretical phonetics - syllable division and different approaches to it.

Branches of phonetics

We know that the phonic medium can be studied from four points of view: the articulatory, the acoustic, the auditory, and the functional.

We may consider the branches of phonetics according to these aspects. Articulatory phonetics is the study of the way the vocal organs are used to produce speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds. Auditory phonetics is the study of the way people perceive speech sounds. Of these three branches of phonetics, the longest established, and until recently the most highly developed, is articulatory phonetics. For this reason, most of terms used by linguists to refer to speech-sounds are articulatory in origin.

Phoneticians are also interested in the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language. In other words, they study the abstract side of the sounds of language. The branch of phonetics concerned with the study of the functional (linguistic) aspect of speech sounds is called phonology. By contrast with phonetics, which studies all possible sounds that the human vocal apparatus can make, phonology studies only those contrasts in sound which make differences of meaning within language.

Besides the four branches of phonetics described above, there are other divisions of the science. We may speak of general phonetics and the phonetics of a particular language (special or descriptive phonetics). General phonetics studies all the sound-producing possibilities of the human speech apparatus and the ways they are used for purpose of communication. The phonetics of a particular language studies the contemporary phonetic system of the particular language, i.e. the system of its pronunciation, and gives a description of all the phonetic units of the language. Descriptive phonetics is based on general phonetics.

Linguists distinguish also historical phonetics whose aim is to trace and establish the successive changes in the phonetic system of a given language (or a language family) at different stages of its development. Historical phonetics is a part of the history of language.

Closely connected with historical phonetics is comparative phonetics whose aims are to study the correlation between the phonetic systems of two or more languages and find out the correspondences between the speech sounds of kindred languages.

Phonetics can also be theoretical and practical. At the faculties of Foreign Languages in this country, two courses are introduced:

Practical, or normative, phonetics that studies the substance, the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning.

Theoretical phonetics, which is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in language.

This dichotomy is that which holds between theoretical and applied linguists. Briefly, theoretical linguistics studies language with a view to constructing theory of its structure and functions and without regard to any practical applications that the investigation of language might have. Applied linguistics has as its concerns the application of the concepts and findings of linguistics to a variety of practical tasks, including language teaching.

All the branches of phonetics are closely connected not only with one another but also with other branches of linguistics. This connection is determined by the fact that language is a system whose components are inseparably connected with one another.

Phonetics is also connected with many other sciences. Acoustic phonetics is connected with physics and mathematics. Articulatory phonetics is connected with physiology, anatomy, and anthropology. Historical phonetics is connected with general history of the people whose language is studied; it is also connected with archaeology. Phonology is connected with communication (information) theory, mathematics, and statistics.