Intonation Group
One thing all singers have in common is that they know how to breathe properly. When we speak it is like when we sing. While speaking we pause to break speech and to take a breath. It happens naturally and subconsciously since it is not possible to sing the whole song in a breath as well as to pronounce long utterances in one breath. Saying a sentence we group our words into thoughts. If you group words naturally they will make a better flow of your speech and it will be easier for people to understand you. For better comprehension let us read the text below in two different ways. The first time read the text with unnatural pausing, the second time read it with groups of thoughts. (Pauses in speech that stand for boundaries of groups of thoughts are marked with diagonal bar within a sentence and two bars at the end of a sentence).
Reading # 1
When / I was a / girl, / I skipped down / paths, / danced in my / bedroom, / spun in circles under / the sky, jumped / rope with my / friends, and squatted to smell flowers in my / mother’s / garden.//
Reading # 2
When I was a girl, / I skipped down paths, / danced in my bedroom, / spun in circles under the sky, / jumped rope with my friends, / and squatted to smell flowers in my mother’s garden.//
You certainly feel some difference between these two readings. The difference is in the quality of the groups of words that are separated by pauses. The pauses in the first reading are deliberately made unnatural and it is quite hard to understand the idea of the spoken message.
So our speech is divided into groups of words or chunks of thoughts delimited by means of intonation. Linguists term these chunks differently: sense groups, tone units, breath groups, phonological phrases, tone groups, intonation groups.
An intonation group is a piece of utterance, a word or a group of words with a continuous stream of sounds, bounded by a pause, organized syntactically to express a thought. Pausing in some sense is a way of packaging information into intonation groups in such a way that the latter form in our imagination certain psychological images carried by the chunks of thoughts.
Structure of an Intonation Group of Non-Emphatic Pattern
As it was considered before division of speech into intonation groups can usually coincide with grammar units that are singled out by pauses and intonation. However first of all intonation is the use of pitch to provide necessary information. Each intonation group has pitch movements. The chunks of speech that are already known as intonation groups are structured with the help of pitch movements around one most important move of pitch. So the most important word that distinguishes most important information in the sound continuum of one intonation group produces dynamic movement of pitch of the voice. In this way it testifies its prominence. Actually it is not even the whole word (unless it is one syllable word) but just the stressed syllable of the most important word that bears a dynamic pitch movement. Hereafter it is called the nuclear or tonic syllable of the intonation group. The nucleus is only one of the elements of an intonation unit. All other structural elements of intonation group are: the Pre-Head, the Head and the Tail.
The Pre-Head (P-H) is a part of the intonation group which contains all unstressed syllables before the first stressed syllable.
The Head (H) is a part of the intonation group that starts with the first stressed syllable containing all following stressed and unstressed ones up to the last stressed syllable (not including it).
The Nucleus (N) is the last stressed syllable of the intonation group. All main changes of pitch movement take place within it. The last accent or pitch prominence falls on the stressed syllable of the most informative word. It is the only mandatory element of the intonation group.
However the nucleus can occur before the last content word because the latter turns out not to be the most informative word of an utterance. In this case the stressed syllable before the potentially last stressed employs semantic emphasis and contrast, for example, in a dialogue like:
A – I’ve got some nice Arabic coffee for our coffee breaks.
B – I’m sorry, I don’t drink coffee. (‘drink’ is the nucleus, not ‘coffee’, though the latter is the last content word)
In such a case we may say about emphatic or logical stress that determines the main idea of a saying. Depending on the place of the logical stress the message may be different. Feel the difference in the following messages: I’m going to talk to you today. I’m going to talk to you today. I’m going to talk to you today. I’m going to talk to you today. I’m going to talk to you today.
Developing the ability to hear, understand and reproduce sentence stress is the main task to mastering English intonation.
The Tail (T) contains all unstressed syllables after the nucleus and continues the melody of the last stressed syllable. The nucleus and the tail form the terminal tone.
Let us consider an example of the intonation group that has all the elements. In the example the stressed syllables are underlined and the syllable which bears the big pitch movement thus being the nucleus is printed in capital letters:
My friend is very CLEver. //
P-H Head N T
This is the structure of the ‘ideal’ organization of the intonation group. As stretches of speech are not equally divided and correspond to different grammar units some intonation patterns of intonation groups may not contain the pre-head if an utterance starts with a content word with the first stressed syllable in it, for example:
Britain’s climate is TEMperate. //
Head N T
In some intonation groups it may be the pre-head without the head when the first accented syllable is the nucleus, for example:
It’s Fabulous! //
P-H N T
There can be no tail in the intonation group, for example:
The west of Ukraine will be cloudy and WET. //
P-H Head N
Variations of pitch within an intonation group can be indicated graphically by the consistent system for marking intonation, where arrow is used for the head, upright dash for stressed syllables in the head, diagonal downward dash denotes falling intonation and diagonal upward dash indicates rising intonation, unstressed syllables have no graphic indication in a sentence, e.g.:
What’s wrong with global warming?
On the staves pitch movements also have their specific system of marking:
a
dash represents a pitch level of the stressed syllable
a dot represents unstressed syllables . . .
a
downward curve denotes the final fall of intonation
a
n
upward curve denotes the final rise
Unstressed syllables which form the tail are pronounced on the lowest pitch level if the terminal tone is falling. They gradually rise from the pitch level of the nuclear tone level if the terminal tone is rising.
Unstressed syllables which form the pre-head are pronounced either on the lower pitch if the speaker is indifferent and contributes very little to the conversation or rise gradually to the pitch of the first stressed syllable if the speaker is emotionally neutral.