Section II components of intonation (prosody). Utterance-stress Unit 1. The Structure and Functions of Utterance-Stress. Peculiarities of English Utterance-Stress

Utterance-stress (sentence-stress) is a prosodic phenomenon of speech. Its function is to indicate the relative importance of various elements in an utterance. This function is realized through phonetic contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables in an utterance, that shows their different phonetic prominence.

The effect of phonetic prominence can be described as an increase of the force of articulation (intensity), length (duration) and pitch level (fundamental frequency of the voice). Besides, the articulation of a vowel (formant structure) also plays a role in the perception of utterance-stress: a prominent syllable always has a full quality vowel. The reason for it lies in the close relationship between utterance-stress and word-stress: it is the stressed syllable of a word that carries prominence when this word is important in an utterance. However, not all the syllables that are stressed when the word is pronounced in isolation retain prominence in connected speech. Compare, e.g.:

'well-'read

He's a'mazingly well-^\read.

He is an a'mazingly 'well-read ^\person.

On the other hand, a syllable which is unstressed in an isolated word may become stressed in an utterance. Compare, e.g.:

un'pleasant

I ^\Didn't say it was _/pleasant. Quite on the contrary, I said it was ^\unpleasant.

A word carrying Utterance­'s stress is at the same time the carrier of a tone which is defined as a combination of a pitch change (or pitch contrast) with the force of articulation, and the number of stresses in an utterance coincides with the number of tones.

When we deal with utterance-stress we speak about the prominence of words carrying greater semantic weight. So, in other words, the English utterance-stress is realized through phonetic contrast between prominent and non-prominent words.

The occurrence and the distribution of utterance-stress in an English utterance are determined by factors of two kinds: semantic and rhythmic.

The influence of the rhythmic factor is realized mainly in the placement of prenuclear stresses, the number and the distribution of which depend on: 1) the semantic weight of the words; 2) the ten­dency towards alternating prominent and non-prominent words.

In English, as in other languages, words have different potential “accentability” and are subdivided into “stressable”, and 'unstressable”.

This classification of English words according to their accentability is based on the following general principle: stress on notional words and absence of stress on function words.

A peculiarity of English is a great number of form-words, or function words, and their extremely high frequency in speech.

Another peculiarity is that monosyllabic function words, when unstressed, have in many cases a weakened vowel in English. In other words, the use of a vowel of full quality, i.e. the use of a strong form, in this position leads to a considerable foreign accent and can even cause misunderstandings. The list of function words includes: articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions, some pronouns, auxiliary and modal verbs.

According to their pronunciation in an unstressed position function words can be divided into several groups. The first group consist of words that are never used in their strong form in an unstressed position in an utterance. The second group

includes auxiliary and modal verbs as well as prepositions which are reduced when unstressed at the beginning or in the middle of an utterance, but retain their strong form when unstressed at the end of an utterance (or for some of the function words at the beginning of it). The t h i r d g r o u p is for words that retain their strong form regardless of stress or utterance position (p. 82-85) .