- •Л. Л. Баранова
- •L. L. Baranova
- •Isbn 978-5-7429-0346-8
- •Foreword
- •Introduction
- •The Dialectical Unity of the Oral and Written Forms of English.
- •Their Interrelationship. Feature Level vs. Semantic Level.
- •The Segmental and Suprasegmental Approaches
- •Levels of cognition
- •The English Articulation Basis
- •Phonotactics
- •False etymology
- •High fall
- •Low Fall
- •Exclamation Mark
- •The Comma41
- •Subordination
- •The Semicolon45
- •The Colon
- •The Dash
- •The Indented Line
- •Conclusion
- •English consonant clusters
- •Postvocalic clusters
- •Intervocalic clusters
- •Syllabification
- •Accentual Types of Words
- •The Minimal Pairs Approach
- •The Rules of Reading56
- •I. In accented syllables
- •II. In unaccented syllables.
- •I. In accented syllables
- •II. In unaccented syllables
- •I. In accented syllables
- •II. In unaccented syllables.
- •I. In accented syllables
- •II. In unaccented syllables
- •I. In accented syllables
- •References
- •Contents
High fall
The situation is simply appalling.
From the very beginning of our philological careers we must reconcile ourselves to the English we speak with forever remaining less interesting or idiomatic than the excellent varieties of the English we speak aout.
Low Fall
Many compound and some complex sentences require nothing but a\full|stop.
The next word after a full stop must start with a ’c a p i t a l \letter.
One of the generally recognized masters of English style is ’Jane \Austen.
Exclamation Mark
“Memory chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened” (!). “Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us” (?). A playfully paradoxical and distorted view of things and their actual relations! Everything is pure imagination, nothing people think or say has got anything to do with facts!
Remember the difference between the English we speak with and the English we speak about!
47
The most important point to be remembered in connection with the full stop is this: one should learn to produce low falling tones and not yield to the temptation of using high falling ones when they are out of place. If we want to make a statement which is not arguable or contradictory, it is invariably pronounced with a low fall.
We should constantly bear in mind what the intention of the author (speaker or writer) is, what he/or she wants to achieve, because everything depends on what the purport of the author is.
Furthermore, besides signalling the end of the sentence, the full stop has got a certain expression-plane — either a high falling tone or a low falling tone. Which one to use in which situation? The reader decides this on the declamational-psychological basis, always remembering that there are two prosodies per one stop (the full stop). And there is also the exclamation mark which can be read both with a high fall and a low fall.
The Comma41
A.M. Peškovsky said that the comma is the most important and, at the same time, the most troublesome punctuation mark of all. Why, then, did we begin with the full stop and why did we attach so much importance to it? The thing is that in modern English the tendency is towards under-punctuation, under-stopping, and people can do away with as many commas as they like. Commas are not obligatory, they are not grammatical in English. In other words, they are not prescribed by the rules of grammar to such an extent as the Russian commas are.
When we turn to the comma, we should bear in mind the three basic prosodies: first, we should learn to pronounce a sentence of any length without commas, we should learn to produce the proper Glide Down.42 Sometimes this is a very strenuous task for a Russian learner of English who is not accustomed to the declamational-psychological segmentation of the text, although there may be quite a few “that”, “because”, “but” and so on in the sentence. For example:
48
Our analysis of extracts from Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters” has shown that this genre is much nearer to the one we would recommend for the foreign anglicists “active” than fiction, however good.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the style of some modern literary critics who so often forget about “plain words” and do not heed the advice of so many Masters concerning what Hazlitt called “an unvarnished medium to convey ideas”.
This brings us back to what has already been said about certain typical word-combinations which have always been regarded as a kind of linguistic “no man’s land”.
The second case is when we have a comma for co-ordination. According to the rules, the prosody here is the following: a pause, which is the shortest of all the pauses accompanying the rest of punctuation marks, and a mid-falling tone.
The third case is a comma for subordination. In this instance, besides having the already mentioned pause, we have a low-rising tone. For example:
Co-ordination
We are more sparing of commas nowdays, and this practice has gone out of fashion.
Not only does conventional practice vary from period to period, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves.