4. Utterance prosody (intonation)

Every concrete utterance has a certain prosodic structure or intonation. Intonation is a complex unity of speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm, voice timbre, which the speakers use to express thoughts, emotions. They are all components of intonation. The notion of prosody is broader than the notion of intonation as it can be applied to the utterance, the word, the syllable, whereas prosody of utterance and intonation are equivalent notions.

Prosodic units: 1) The syllable is widely recognized to be smallest prosodic unit. It has no meaning of its own. Prosodic features of the syllable (tone, stress, duration) depend on its position and function in the rhythmic unit and in the utterance. 2) A rhythmic unit is a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it. The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic unit. The unstressed s. are clitics, those preceding the stressed syllable are proclitics, those following – enclitics. 3) The intonation group is hierarchically higher than the rhythmic unit. Structurally the intonation group has some obligatory formal characteristics. These are the nuclear stress, on the semantically most important word and the terminal tone. The intonation group is a meaningful unit. The structure depends on the number of syllables and rhythmic group. Prehead, head, nucleus, tail. The most important is the function of the nucleus: its prosodic features express communicative and attitudinal meanings indicate the end of the intonation group. Head-attitudinal meanings. Prehead- emotional meaning. 4) In speech single utterances are not frequent. They are connected and grouped into larger units- hyperutterances, phonetic paragraphs and texts and formed prosodic structures of hyperutterances, the phonetic paragraphs and texts.

Prosodic subsystems: 1) The tonal subsystem (pitch component) of prosody. The pitch component of intonation is the variations in the pitch of the voice. There are 3 main linguistically relevant pitch levels in English: -low, - mid, -high. 2) The accentual subsystem (Utterance stress).Some words in an utterance appear to contribute more information than others. Those that are semantically more important are made prominent- Utterance stress. 3) Rhythm has been defined as regularity or periodicity in the occurrence of a particular phenomenon in an utterance. 4) The tempo of speech is the rate at which utterances and their smaller units are pronounced. Tempo is usually measured by the number of syllables per second. Tempo can also be used to express the speaker’s attitude or emotion.

5) The main function of pause is to segment connected speech into utterances and intonation groups to delimit one utterance or int. group from another. There are 3 main types of pauses: 1. Silent pause 2. Pauses of perception. 3. Voiced pauses.

The functional aspect of prosody: The functions and meanings of prosody should be described with reference to the utterance. The prosody of an utterance carries independent meanings of its own. The prosody of the utterance is polysemantic. Due to its structural complexity it can express a number of different meanings.

1. The constitutive function is to form utterances as communicative units.

2. The distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in several particular functions, depending on the meaning which is differentiated. a) The communicative-distinctive function is to differentiate the communicative types of utterances, i.e. statements, questions, exclamations. b) The modal-distinctive (attitudinal-distinctive) function of prosody manifests itself to differentiate modal meanings of utterances and the speaker’s attitudes. c) The culminative-distinctive function of prosody manifests itself to differentiate the location of the semantic nuclei of utterances. (logic) d) The syntactical-distinctive function of prosody is to differentiate syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations in sentences.

e) Stylistic-distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in that prosody differentiates pronunciation (phonetic) styles,determined by extralinguistic factors.

3. The identificatory function of prosody helps the hearer to identificate the communicative and modal type of an utterance.

The practice of alternate use of two languages it is bilingualism. The major manifestation of bilingualism is interference. Language interference is a process and a result of the interaction and mutual influence of the language systems being in contact. Interference takes place on all levels of language (phonetic, gram, lexical.). Prosodic interference manifests itself in deviations from the prosodic norm of a language which result from the influence of the other language. Prosodic patterns of their native language may, and do sound wrong when applied to Eng. Wrong realizations of prosodic patterns give a foreign accent.

Interference from the native language in Eng. utterances spoken by Russian and Bel. learners of Eng. is observed in all the subsystems of prosody. The influence in the pitch patterns- manifests itself in the following deviations: -wider pitch interval; -wider pitch range; - lower pitch level. Stress and rhythm are the areas of the greatest number of deviations from prosodic norm. The tempo is slower.