13. Intonation in unemphatic speech.

Unemphatic speech in English is characterized by three principle peculiarities:

1) Sentence stress is distributed equally among the notional words in a syntagm;

2) The stressed syllables of a syntagm form a gradually descending scale;

3) The last stressed syllable (and the unstressed ones that follows it) have one of the two main "tunes" (the falling or the rising tone).

The structure of intonation pattern is the following: unstressed and half-stressed syllables preceding the first stressed syllable constitute the pre-head of the intonation pattern, stressed and unstressed syllables up to the last stressed syllable constitute the head, body or scale of the intonation group. The last stressed syllable, within which fall or rise is accomplished in the intonation group is the nucleus, the syllables that follow the nucleus form the tail.

Pre-heads may be of different types (according to L. Armstrong and ,J. Ward)

1. rising

2. mid

3. low

The English descending scale in an unemphatic speech is a scale of level syllables which follow each other as if forming a step.

The English fall takes place within the last stressed syllable and if it is followed by any unstressed syllables (tail), these are pronounced at a very low pitch level.

And in the Russian language the fall is distributed between the last stressed and the following unstressed syllables.

The Russian rise takes place within the last stressed syllable and sounds rather high, while the English rising tone is lower in its pitch.

17. Intonation in emphatic speech.

Emphasis is an all-round special increase of effort on the part of the speaker.

It is considered to be impossible to formulate exact rules for the use of emphatic intonation. However there are some suggestions. Thus all cases of emphasis can be classified into: l) emphasis for intensity and 2) emphasis for contrast.

There are various means of making an utterance sound emphatic. The variety of means is based on the laws considerably different from those of the unemphatic speech.

«As to the nature of the emphatic means we distinguish two types:

I. Emphatic means which are superimposed, upon the unemphatic scale without breaking its laws. In this case the emphasis is attained by the following means:

a) All the stressed syllables of the intonation group get additional force;

b) Sometimes the range of the voice may be widened or narrowed and this does not violate any of the rules of the unemphatic speech.

II. The second group of the emphatic means is based on breaking the laws of the unemphatic scale:

II.I. whereas the unemphatic speech employs only one type of a scale - the gradually descending stepping -scale, the emphatic speech employs a number of them:

The ascending scale; the sliding scale; the level scale; the scandent scale.

II.2 The variety of the tones employed in the emphatic speech is also richer than that of the unemphatic speech. These are:

The two variants of the falling tone - the high falling tone and the low falling tone.

Three variants of the rising tone - the falling-rising tone; the rising- falling tone; fall+rise.

The level stresses of the unemphatic scale also undergo changes in the emphatic speech. Not all the words of intonation group may be stressed. The stress usually falls on the words which are either emphasized or contrasted. Emphasis for contrast is not connected with the use of special words (such as very, awful, huge, etc. used for intensity); any word may be emphasized.

E.g. why are you here? Why are you here? In the first example the speaker expresses surprise; in the second – indignation.

As a very short resume we should give a few lines: "... intonation is the soul of a language while the pronunciation of its sounds is its body", and everybody knows how vital it is to keep body and soul together.