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Файл:Теоретическая фонетика английского языка = English Theoretical Phonetics. Учебное пособие
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5.7. Functions of Word Stress
articial, uncoun table, qualication, consideration, examination,
temperamental, pronun cia tion, ornamentation, fundamental, distribution,
representation, chara cteristic, interrogation, birdcage, coalmine, teapot,
daybreak, birthday, pillowcase, housewife, schoolboy, timetable, hairdo,
sheepdog, replace, washstand, mailbag, dance music, grandfather,
handwriting, shopkeeper, ladybird, oce-boy, waiting room, dinner
jacket, tape recorder, ground oor, knee-deep, cross-question,
at-footed, shop window, hot-water-bottle, waste-paper-basket,
postgraduate, secondhand.
8. Put down stress marks in the words. Comment on the tendencies
in their stress patterns.
Ascertain, acquiesce, grotesque, cigarette, antique, saloon, employee,
career, lemonade, atomic, phonetic, phonological, familiarity, benecial,
ecient, aqueous, residual, impetuous, propriety, active, relative,
gratitude, attitudinal.
61
UNIT 6.
INTONATION IN ENGLISH
The information conveyed by a sentence is expressed not only by
proper words and grammar structures, but also by intonation. The term
intonation implies a complex unity formed by signicant variations
of pitch, loudness (force) and tempo. Variations of pitch are produced
by signicant moves of the voice up and down. The force component
of intonation is measured by the degree of loudness of syllables that
determines the prominence of words. The tempo is determined by
the rate of speech and the length of pauses.
Alongside of the term “intonation” the term “prosody” is widely used.
Prosody and prosodic denote non-segmental phenomena, which do not
enter into the system of segmental phonemes. The notion of prosody is
broader than the notion of intonation as it can be applied to the utterance,
the word, the syllable. The prosody of an utterance and intonation are
equivalent notions.
6.1. Prosodic Units
One of the basic problems in the study of intonation or prosody is to
determine its units.
The syllable is the smallest prosodic unit, which has no meaning
of its own but is very important for building up more complex units of
intonation. It has its prosodic features: tone, stress and duration.
The rhythmic group is either one stressed syllable or one stressed
syllable and a number of unstressed syllables grouped around it.
The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic group. There are as
62
6.1. Prosodic Units
many rhythmic groups in the utterance as there are stressed syllables in
it. Rhythmic groups are always meaningful.
Pitch movements, loudness and the tempo of speech form the basic
unit of intonation or intonation pat tern. It contains one nucleus and may
contain other stressed or unstressed syllables.
Intonation patterns actualize syntagms in oral speech. The syntagm
(an intonation group) is a group of words which is semantically and
syntactically complete, e. g.:
Heˋs ˈnearly ˋsixty.
As a ˈmatter of ˏfact | he΄s ˈnearly ^sixty.
The vertical bar (|) represents a pause at the end of the intonation
group within a sentence.
The intonation pattern consists of one or more syllables of various
pitch levels and bears a larger or smaller degree of prominence. Those
intonation patterns that contain a number of syllables consist of
the following parts: the pre-head, the head, the nucleus and the tail, e. g.:
↘didn΄t 'know you΄ve been to
I
pre-head
head
ˎLon
nucleus
don.
tail
The head and the pre-head form the pre-nuclear part of
the intonation pattern. The pre-nuclear part can take a variety of pitch
patterns. Variation within the pre-nucleus often conveys meanings
associated with attitude.
Initial unstressed syllables make the pre-head. If unstressed or
partially stressed syllables are pronounced lower than the rst stressed
syllable of the head, the pre-head is called low. If unstressed or partially
stressed syllables are pronounced higher or on the same level as the rst
stressed syllable of the head the pre-head is called high, e. g.:
־ I don´t ↘want to ˋgo to the cinema.
Stressed syllables preceding the nucleus together with the intervening
unstressed syllables form the head of a tone unit. It stretches from the rst
stressed syllable up to (but not including) the nucleus.
Head patterns are classied into three major groups: descending,
ascending and level.
63
Unit 6. Intonation in English
In descending heads the voice usually moves down from a medium
or high pitch level to the low one; the stressed syllables (usually with
intervening unstressed ones) forming a descending sequence, e. g.:
I ↘ don´t ˋwant to ˋgo to the ˎcinema.
The tone-mark [↘] on the rst stressed syllable of any type of
descending heads shows the general direction of the voice movement, its
descending character.
Ascending heads are the opposite of descending ones. Their rst
stressed syllable is low in the pitch, each following stressed syllable
being higher than the preceding one; thus the stressed syllables form an
ascending sequence, e. g.:
I ↗don´t `want to `go to the `cinema.
The tone-mark [↗] on the rst stressed syllable of ascending heads
shows the general rising direction of the voice movement.
In level heads all the syllables are pronounced on more or less
the same note of a pitch level. The most frequently used type of level
heads is the head with one strongly stressed syllable and unstressed or
partially stressed syllables pronounced on the same high level (High
Head), e. g.:
I → di dn´t⟍ know it.
The nucleus of an intonation pattern is a syllable with the greater
prominence than the others. It is generally the last strongly accented
syllable of an intonation pattern the most prominent one in the intonation
pattern. Nuclear syllable marks a signicant change of pitch direction.
The changes of pitch that take place in the nucleus are called nuclear
tones. There are seven nuclear tones in Modern English:
y the Low (Medium) Fall. The voice falls from the low (medium)
pitch level to the bottom of the pitch;
ˎNo.
y the High Fall. The voice falls all the way down from a high to
the lowest note possible;
`No.
64
6.1. Prosodic Units
y the Rise-Fall. The voice usually rises from a medium to a high pitch
level and then quickly falls to a low pitch;
˰
No.
y the Low Rise. The voice rises from a very low to a medium pitch
level or a little higher;
ˏNo.
y the High (Medium) Rise. The voice rises from a medium or high
pitch level and moves up to the top of the voice;
͵
No.
The Medium Rise The High Rise
y the Fall-R ise. The voice rst falls from a medium or high to a rather
low pitch level then rises to a moderately medium pitch;
˯No.
The Fall-Rise
of a medium range
The Fall-Rise
of a wide range
The Fall-Rise
of a narrow range
y the Mid-Level maintains a level pitch between high and low;
the voice neither rises nor falls;
˲
No.
These tones are called kinetic or moving because the pitch
the voice moves upwards or downwards during the whole duration of
the tone.
R. Kingdon also distinguishes static tones, in which the voice remains
steady on a given pitch throughout the duration of the tone:
y the High Level tone;
y the Low Level tone.
The pitch can change either in one direction only (Simple tone) and
more than one direction (Complex tone).
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Unit 6. Intonation in English
Table 17. The Meanings of the Nuclear Tones
Tone Notation General Meaning
Low Fall ˎm neutral, phlegmatic, calm, cool, reserved
High Fall ˋm completeness, insistence, protest, personal concern,
involvement in statements;
non-nal, light, airy in short armative answers
Low Rise ˏm incompleteness, interrogation in questions;
the speaker’s interest in the situation and in the listener’s
response in statements;
non-assertiveness and lack of interest in casual remarks,
afterthoughts
High Rise ˊm a marked interrogative force, surprise, incredulity in
interrogative repetitions, echo-questions;
active searching for information, encouraging further
conversation
Fall-Rise ˅m emphasis, contrast, contradiction, correction, hesitation,
doubt, uncertainty, warning, apology in statements;
pleading and warning in imperatives;
pleasant and friendly in conversational formulas
Rise-Fall ^m impressed, challenging, disclaiming responsibility in
imperatives and questions;
irony, sarcasm, quizzical attitude in statements
Mid Level ˃m non-nality without any expression of expectancy
Unstressed and half-stressed syllables following the nucleus are called
the tail. The tone of a nucleus determines the pitch of the tail. After
a falling tone, the rest of the intonation pattern is at a low pitch. After
a rising tone the rest of the intonation pattern moves in an upward pitch
direction.
The nucleus and the tail form what is called the terminal tone.
The only obligatory part of an intonation group is its nucleus. The head,
the pre-head and the tail are optional elements of intonation structure.
Speech melody or the pitch component of the intonation is acoustically
the variations of the fundamental frequency generated by the vibrations
of the vocal cords.
The pitch range is the interval between the highest-pitched syllable
and the lowest-pitched syllable. It may be widened or narrowed to express
the speaker‘s attitudes and emotions. Variations in pitch range occur
66
6.2. Functional Aspect of Intonation
within the normal range of the human voice, i. e. within its upper and
lower limits.
Three pitch ranges are generally distinguished: normal, wide and
narrow.
Normal Wide Narrow (of low,
medium and high levels)
The pitch level shows the degree of semantic importance that
the speaker attaches to the utterance or intonation group in comparison
with any other utterance or intonation group. It is determined by the
pitch of its highest-pitched syllable. The number of levels in unemphatic
speech is three: low, mid and high. Besides some phoneticians distinguish
two more pitch levels: the emphatic and the emotional.
High
Medium
Low
The meaning of the intonation group is the combination of
the “meanings” of the terminal tone and the pre-nuclear part combined
with the “meaning” of pitch range and pitch level. The more the height
of the pitch contrasts within the intonation pattern the more emphatic
the intonation group sounds.
6.2. Functional Aspect of Intonation
Because of the complex nature of intonation there is no agreement
among scientists about the functional aspect of intonation. Dierent
phoneticians name, describe and classify the functions of intonation
in dierent ways. Belarusian phoneticians agreed that the prosody of
an utterance performs a number of functions, the basic of which are
constitutive, distinctive and identicatory.
The constitutive function is to form utterances as communicative
units. Prosody forms all communicative types of utterances: statements,
questions, imperatives, exclamations and modal (attitudinal) types, such
as categoric statements, quizzical statements, certainty and uncertainty
67
Unit 6. Intonation in English
questions, etc. At the same time prosody performs the segmentative
and delimitative function, when it segments connected discourse into
utterances and intonation groups and delimits them from one another,
showing relations between them. It also signals the semantic nucleus and
other semantically important words of an utterance or an intonation group.
The distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in several
particular functions, depending on the meaning which is dierentiated.
The communicative-distinctive function is to dierentiate
the communicative types and subtypes of utterances.
The modal-distinctive (attitudinal-distinctive) function determines
that intonation dierentiates modal meanings of an utterance and
the speaker’s attitudes. Various modal meanings can also be expressed
by lexical and grammatical means, but in actual speech the listener is
more interested in the speaker’s ‘tone’ than in his words.
The culminative-distinctive function manifests itself in
dierentiating the location of the semantic nuclei of utterances and other
semantically important words. This function is often called logical,
predicative and accentual. Intonation indicates the “theme – rheme”
organization of an utterance, i. e. it distinguishes between what is already
known and what is new in the utterance, e. g.:
theme rheme
The ˈteacher has ˋcome.
rheme theme
The ˋteacher has ˌcome.
The syntactical-distinctive function of prosody is to dierentiate
syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations in sentences, e. g.:
ˏJane, said her ˈmother,| was ˈ fond of ˋknitting (a compou n d se nt e nc e).
ˈJan e ˏsaid, | her ˈmother was ˈ fond of ˋknitting (a complex sentence
with an object subordinate clause).
But there is no direct relation between prosody and grammar and
intonation cannot be described in terms of the syntactical structures with
which it occurs.
Stylistic-distinctive function means prosody dierentiates pronuncia tion (phonetic) styles, determined by extralinguistic factors.
The identicatory function of intonation is to provide a basis for
hearer’s identication of the communicative and modal type of an utterance,
its semantic and syntactical structure with the situation of the discourse.
68
6.3. Rhythm
All the functions of prosody are fullled simultaneously and cannot
be separated one from another. They show that utterance prosody is
linguistically signicant and meaningful.
6.3. Rhythm
Regularity or periodicity in the occurrence of a particular phenomenon
in an utterance dened as rhythm. Languages dier in their rhythm
mainly because of this phenomenon. In some languages the recurring
phenomena are stresses, in others – syllables. Linguists divide languages
into two groups:
y syllable-timed like French, Spanish and other Romance languages;
y stress-timed languages, such as Germanic languages like English
and German, as well as Belarusian.
In a syllable-timed language the speaker gives an approximately
equal amount of time to each syllable, whether the syllable is stressed or
unstressed and this produces the eect of even rather staccato rhythm.
Stress-timed rhythm presupposes that utterance stress serves as
a basis for the rhythmical organization of speech and that stresses segment
the speech continuum into units of more or less equal length. These are
accentual, or rhythmic units. Though the amount of time given on each
syllable varies considerably, the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit
is practically unchanged. The stressed syllables of a rhythmic unit tend
to be pronounced at regular intervals. Since the rhythmic units dier
in the number of syllables they are comprised of, the syllables of the
longer groups are compressed by very rapid pronunciation and those of
the shorter ones are lengthened to conform to the same interval of time.
This produces perceptible isochrony of rhythmic units within the limits
of a given intonation group.
Speech rhythm has the immediate inuence on vowel reduction
and elision. Form words such as prepositions, conjunctions as well as
auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns are usually
unstressed and pronounced in their weak forms with reduced or even
elided vowels to secure equal intervals between the stressed syllables. To
bring the meaning of the utterance to the listener the stressed syllables
of the notional words are given more prominence by the speaker and the
unstressed monosyllabic form words are left very weak.
Acoustically, rhythm is a complex of variations in frequency, intensity
and duration. Since the basis of rhythm is stress, rhythm is a structural
69
Unit 6. Intonation in English
acoustic phenomenon and it is achieved by the same acoustic parameters
that produce the eect of stress.
It has long been believed that the basic rhythmic unit is a rhythmic
group. A rhythmic, or accentual, group is either one stressed syllable or
a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it.
The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic unit. There are
as many rhythmic units in an utterance as there are stressed syllables
in it. The unstressed syllables are clitics. Those preceding the stressed
syllable are called proclitics, and those following it – enclitics.
Depending on the position of the stressed syllable and the number
of proclitics and enclitics in the rhythmic group there exist various
accentual-and-rhythmic patterns of it. Besides a denite accentualand-rhythmic pattern, the rhythmic group is characterized by a pitch
pattern (or tonal contour) and duration pattern (temporal structure).
The rhythmic unit may be singled out of an utterance due to the meanings
expressed by its prosodic features, e. g.:
The ˋdoctor ˋsays it’s ˈnot quite ˋserious contains one intonation
group = four hyth mic groups:
1st rhythmic
group
Proclitics +
nucleus + enclitics
The ˈdoctor ˈsays it’s ˈnot quite ˋserious
2nd rhythmic
group
nucleus
3d rhythmic
group
Proclitics +
nucleus
4th rhythmic
group
Proclitics +
nucleus + enclitics
The boundaries between rhythmic units are determined by
the semantic and grammatical relations between the words of an utterance.
With such rhythmic division the syllables of a word always belong to
the same rhythmic unit; form words, join the stressed syllable as proclitics
and enclitics, depending on their semantic links. The speech tempo and
style often regulate the division into rhythmic groups. The enclitic tendency
(the unstressed syllables in between the stressed ones join the preceding
stressed syllable) is more typical for informal speech. The semantic
tendency (unstressed syllables are drawn towards the stressed syllable of
the same word or to the lexical unit according to their semantic connection)
prevails in accurate, more explicit speech.
Rhythmic units form a certain hierarchy, since stresses, on which
they are based, are not equal in their prominence, position and function.
70
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