Глава 17. The theory of intonation

Every concrete utterance together with its phonemic and syllabic structure has its prosodic structures (or intonation).

A syntagm is a word or a group of words organized syntactically and phonetically to express a thought unit.

A syntagm may coincide with a sentence or may be part of the sentence.

He‘s got a lot of things with him. (syntagm=sentence)

. ¯ ` ..

Yes, || books, | magazines, | vocabulary | and many other things. (4 syntagms).

A syntagm has some structural characteristics:

1. nucleus (nuclear tone) ( ) it’s a mostly semantically important word, it’s a terminal tone. It has pitch variations. The boundaries between the syntagms are marked by a tonal junctures and pauses. The syntagm is a meaningful unit. It’s most general meaning is either completeness, finality or incompleteness, non-finality. The structure of the syntagm varies depending on the number of syllables and rhythmic units in it. The minimal syntagm consists of 1 stressed syllable – nucleus.

- Who did it?

- I.– nucleus.

Maximally the syntagm consists of

the pre-head (. ), the head (¯ ` ), the nucleus ( ), the tail (..)

Intonation has a number of definitions now. Some western phoneticians understand under the term of intonation only melody. Others think that intonation includes tone (stress).

Russian phoneticians of later year think that intonation is acomplex unity of several components: melody, stress, rhythm, timbre, pauses, temp.

They enable the speaker to express a dequatly the meaning og sentences, the attitude of the speaker to the content and the emotions of the speaker.

Not all the elements of int-n are equally studied. The most important elements of int-n are melody, stress and rhythm.

1. Melody (tone, tune)

It is the rise and fall in the pitch of the voice in the process of speech. 6 main tones: low fall - low rise; high fall - high rise; rise fall - fall rise.

a) The first opposition is the direction of the pitch of the voice. It is used to express finality or non-finality.

b) Range. The pitch movement is low, high.

Low pitch movement: indifferent, neutral, cool.

High: emphatic, interested.

c) Simplicity, complexity of a pitch movement:

Fall; fall-rise

Rise; rise-fall.

Direct meaning , implied meaning.

That’s why these 6 main tones are used in English. They may be reduced to 2 main tones: fall and rise.

The falling tone expresses finality and is definite, categoric.

The falling tone has a definite gram-al function. It is usally used in statements, special questions, exclamations, commands, greetings, disjunctive questions, alternative questions.

The rising tone sounds non-final, is complete, it is non-categoric. It is used in general questions, in requests, polite remarks, alternative questions, disjunctive questions, non-final syntagms, enumerations, statements, finished grammatically but not semantically.

The two tones, fall and rise have different variations which depend on the aim of communication, and two phoneticians (Arnold and O’Conner) worked out the system of 10 tone-groups in English in which every tone-group expresses a certain attitude, certain emotions.