Intonation of imperatives

Imperative sentences are used in speech for different communicative purposes: to express a command or an instruction, to ask for a favour or to give a warning. Accordingly, we can talk about different communicative subtypes of imperatives: commands and instructions, requests, warnings.

Commands and Instructions are usually pronounced with the Falling nuclear tone. In an Instruction it is typically a Mid Fall with the preceding High or Stepping Head:

e.g.: 'Open the 'books at page ‘nine.

In Commands the Falling nuclear tone is more frequently of a high variety which gives them an energetic and insistent note:

e.g.: 'Leave the 'room at ‘once.

Commands with a Low Falling nuclear tone preceded by a High or Stepping Head produce a calm, serious and categorical effect:

e.g.: 'Wait for the others.

It must be noted that Requests can also be pronounced with the Falling tone, but in this case the word “please” which is placed either at the beginning or at the end of an imperative shows that the speaker's intention is to ask and not to order:

e.g.: 'Stay a little ‘longer, please.

More typically Requests are pronounced with the Low Rising or the Falling-Rising nuclear tone:

e.g.: 'Try not to be ˇlate. 'Fetch me my ˇcoat. 'Wrap this 'vase ˇcarefully.

Requests with all these intonation patterns sound sincere and friendly. When Fall-Rise is used, especially of a divided variant there is an impression that the speaker is asking a greater favour. Such requests are often called polite.

Warnings have the same intonation pattern as polite Requests: they are normally pronounced with the Falling-Rising nuclear tone. The exact nature of the imperative — a warning or a request — is nearly always clear from the situation and the speaker’s voice colouring.

When a Warning contains only one stressable word, Fall-Rise Undivided is used. When there are more than one stressable words, Fall-Rise Divided is preferable:

e.g.: Be ˇcareful. ‘Watch your ‚step.

Imperatives of all kinds can be pronounced with the Low Rising nuclear tone preceded by a Low Head or a Low Prehead. Such imperatives sound casual (in the case of a request), unimportant (in the case of a command):

e.g.: Steady ‚on. Fetch me a ‚chair.

Intonation, its components and functions

Intonation is a unity of:

• speech melody (variations in the pitch of the voice)

• timbre (tonal colouring of the speaker’s voice)

• sentence stress (relative degree of prominence given to various words in a sentence)

• temporal characteristics(duration, pauses, tempo)

• rhythm (periodic recurrence of rhythmic units of different size and level).

Functions of Intonation:

1) Delimiting – delimitation of utterances and parts of utterances in the speech flow

2) Syntactical – reflecting the syntactical relations in the sentence

3) Accentual – indicating more or less important elements of the utterance through contrasts in the degree of prominence of its different parts

4) Attitudinal (modal) – conveying the speaker’s attitude to the subject-matter and to the communicative situation

5) Communicative – indicating the communicative type of an utterance

Speech melody deals with the elements of an intonation group and tones. The elements of an intonation group are:

• the Nucleus (= the nuclear tone )– the basic element of the intonation group;

• the Head (= the scale) – tonetic unit beginning with the first stressed syllable and ending before the nucleus;

• the Pre-Head – variations in unstressed or partially stressed syllables before the Head;

• the Tail – unstressed or partially stressed syllables following the last strongly stressed syllable in the intonation group.

Tones are divided into two classes since they may be pronounced in the following quite distinct ways:

1) by keeping the vocal cords at a constant tension thus producing a tone of unvarying pitch (such tones are known as static or level).

1) by varying the tension of the vocal cords thus producing a tone of varying pitch (such tones are known as kinetic or dynamic).

According to the actual height within the speaker's voice range static (level) tones may be high, mid, low.

Kinetic tones are generally classified according to the following principles:

1) the direction of the pitch change (fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall);

2) the width of the pitch change, or its interval (wide, narrow);

3) the relative position of the pitch change within the speaker’s voice range.