2. The structural elements of prosody.

Prosody is defined as a complex of elements, comprising: voice, pitch, melody of speech, rhythm, intensity, tempo, timbre, pausation ,which serve on the level of a sentence to express various syntactic meanings and categories as well as expressive and emotional connotations.

Voice and Pitch: Voice in its technical phonetic sense of sound resulting from phonation is a musical tone, which has fundamental frequency and therefore a recognizable pitch is in continual fluctuation during speech. Every speaker has a characteristic range of notes within the pitch fluctuation of his voice falls during normal circumstances.

So the pitch of the voice continually fluctuates while we are talking. It seldom rests on a held note for more than a fraction of a second and most of the time it is in the process of either rising or falling. This fluctuation of the voice pitch is found in speech of all communities. It is not a random fluctuation but follows well-defined melodic patterns, which are common to the community and which are considerable linguistic and social importance.

Voice range: variations of tone between the highest and the lowest pitch. High-pitched voices are tenor, soprano, the low-pitched voices are basso, alto.

Tempo and pausation: By tempo is meant speed of speaking, which is best measured by rate of syllable-succession. It is a feature which is varied from time to time by the individual speaker. Some people employ more variations in tempo than in stress, but everyone has a norm which is characteristic of his usual conversational style.

Closely connected with tempo is continuity, which refers to the incidence and frequency of pauses in the stream of speech. Under the conditions of ordinary conversation nobody’s speech is fluent, and the more thought is behind what one is saying the more pauses are introduced.

Intensity of Loudness: depends on the degree of force with which air is expelled from the lungs by the pulmonic air-stream mechanism, while the vocal cords are in vibration. The greater the force, the greater the loudness.

Rhythm: As a very general term rhythm is understood as periodicity in time and space. Rhythm as a linguistic notion is realized in lexical, syntactical and prosodic means and mostly in their combinations. For instance, such figures of speech as sound or word repetition, syntactical parallelism, intensification and others are perceived as rhythmical on the lexical, syntactical and prosodic levels.

In speech, the type of rhythm depends on the language. Linguists divide languages into two groups: syllable-timed, like French, Spanish and other Romance languages and stress-timed languages, such as Germanic languages: English and German, as well as Russian and Ukrainian.

In a syllable-timed language the speaker gives an approximately equal amount of time to each syllable, whether the syllable is stressed or unstressed and this produces the effect of even rather staccato rhythm.

In a stress-timed language, of which English is a good example, the rhythm is based on a larger unit than syllable. Though the amount of time given on each syllable varies considerably, the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit is practically unchanged. The stressed syllables of a rhythmic unit form peaks of prominence. They tend to be pronounced at regular intervals no matter how many unstressed syllables are located between every two stressed ones. Thus the distribution of time within the rhythmic unit is unequal. The markedly regular stress-timed pulses of speech seem to create the strict, abrupt and spiky effect of English rhythm. Russian rhythm is perceived as more flexible, liquid and smooth.

Speech rhythm is traditionally defined as recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in a speech continuum.

Speech rhythm has the immediate influence on vowel reduction and elision. Form words such as prepositions, conjunctions as well as auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns are usually unstressed and pronounced in their weak forms with reduced or even elided vowels to secure equal intervals between the stressed syllables.

The basic rhythmic unit is a rhythmic group, a speech segment which contains a stressed syllable with preceding or/and following unstressed syllables attached to it. The stressed syllable is the prosodic nucleus of the rhythmical group. The initial unstressed syllable preceding the nucleus are called proclitics, those following the nucleus are called enclitics.

Melody of Speech: In English each sentence is pronounced with a certain tune, the structural element of the tune is the syllabic element of either stressed or unstressed syllable that must necessary be pronounced at a certain pitch, with a certain degree of force, within a certain period of time.

Speech melody is one of the most important component of prosody. It is also called intonation or variations of tone. Speech melody usually fluctuates from the highest pitch to the lowest pitch. It fluctuates within a certain range or diapason. According to the character of these fluctuations and the kind of kinetic tone we distinguish different kinds of intonation patterns. Tone variations are regarded within the unit which is called a syntagm. The term was introduced by ac.Scherba to indicate a group of words, which is semantically and syntactically complete.