vse_otvety / 30_Intonatsia_v_sravnenii_s_russkoy

Intonation

Intonation is defined as complex unity of such components as speech melody (pitch variation), sentence stress (accent), tempo, timbre (voice quality) and rhythm.

The speech melody is the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place in a syllable or in a sequence of syllables. It is one the most important means of intonation in different languages and within one language it fulfills almost all the functions, prescribed to intonation.

Stress (accent) means greater prominence given to a syllable (and therefore to a word) in a sentence. In English this prominence is achieved by means of pitch change, length and loudness. It means that the stressed syllable may be pronounced higher in comparison with unstressed, they are longer and of course louder.

Sentence stress is the greater prominence with which one or more words in the sentence are pronounced in comparison with other words. Sentence stress serves to single out words in the sentence according to their relative semantic importance and together with speech melody it is the most important component of the intonation.

It may be full and partial. Full stress in its turn may be unemphatic and emphatic.

Unemphatic stress is a usual type of stress used in normal speech.

Emphatic stress is effected by greater force of utterance, greater force of exhalation and lengthening the sound. It is also accompanied by the changes in the direction of voice (changes in pitch) and the emphatically stressed syllables sound louder in comparison with the unemphatically stressed syllables.

Usually in the connected speech notional words are partially stressed.

Sentence stress has its own specific features in different languages. It is not a secret that some parts of speech that are stressed in one language may be unstressed in the other. Thus the brightest example to that is the unstressed position of pronouns (personal, reflexive, relative) in English and stressed position of them in Russian. Words that are usually stressed in English unemphatic speech are the notional parts of speech, namely nouns, adj., numerals, notional verbs, adverbs, demonstrative, interrogative, emphasizing pronouns.

Tempo of speech is the speed with which a sentence or its parts are pronounced. The tempo of speech can be normal, slow and fast.

The term pause means the full stop of phonation: tentative pauses (׀) and final pauses (׀׀). According to their length all the pauses may be divided into short, average and long.

Short pauses are used to separate intonation groups within a phrase.

Average pauses normally manifest the end of the phrase.

Long pauses, usually very long – twice as long as the first type, separate phonetic wholes.

Functionally all the pauses may be subdivided into syntactic, emphatic and hesitation pauses.

Syntactic pauses separate phonopassages, phrases, and intonation groups.

Emphatic pauses serve to make especially prominent certain parts of the utterances, etc.

Hesitation pauses are mainly used in the spontaneous speech. They may be filled and non-filled.

Timbre (voice quality) (one more synonym for that is timber). It is a special colouring of the voice of a speaker, that superimposed on speech melody and shows the speaker’s emotions, such as joy, sadness, irony, anger, and so on. An individual may put on a wide range of “voices”, this process involves different modes of vibrations of the larynx or of the vocal tract. It is also known as “voice quality”. Voice quality is very important factor in recognizing a particular individual’s voice or even a regional accent.

Rhythm is known as periodicity of such similar prosodic events as tones, pauses, tempo and voice quality variations. Rhythm is closely connected with tempo. The basic unit of rhythm is a rhythmic group – a phonetic unity of a stressed syllable with adjoining unstressed syllables.

Approaches: quantitative approach, temporal approach and accentual approach.

Unit of intonation is a tone-group. Any tone-group may consist of a pre-head (unstressed syllables before the stressed one), head (or onset, the first stressed syllable, with or the following stressed and unstressed syllables except for the last one) and the terminal tone (or the nuclear tone the last stressed syllable in which the fluctuations of voice are observed). The last element of a group is tail or termination – the unstressed syllables or semi-stressed syllables after the nucleus. The head: the term is used in relation to the stretch of the utterance from the first stressed and up to, not including, nuclear tone.

The pre-head refers to any stretch (any part of the utterance) which precedes the first stressed syllable. There are two main types of pre-heads: low and high (pronounced sequently at low and high levels of voice pitch).

The main functions of intonation:

1. Intonation enables us to express our emotions and attitudes as we speak, and this adds a special kind of meaning to the spoken language. This is often called attitudinal function of intonation.

2. Intonation helps to single out the syllables in the phrase that should be stressed and places a tonic stress on a particular syllable that marks the word as the most important in the utterance, makes it an important tone-unit. This has been called the accentual function of intonation.

3. It’s an open secret that intonation enables the speaker to understand the meaning and recognize the grammar and the syntactic structure of the utterance. The examples to it are the pauses between the phrases, clauses and sentences, the difference between questions and statements. This has been called the grammatical function of intonation.

4. Looking at the act of communication in a broader sense we may see that intonation signals to the listener what is to be percepted as “new” information and what is already “given”, can convey to the listener what kind of response is expected from him, can suggest when the speaker is indicating some contrast or link between the tone-units in conversation. Such functions are examples of intonation’s discourse function.

Exercises: listen and repeat; define the attitude of a speaker towards the object of speech according to intonation; pronounce one and the same phrase with different intonation showing your attitude towards the object of speech.