3. Intonation Patterns.

The three prosodic components, such as pitch, loudness and tempo are realized in the process of speech together.

Each syllable of speech chain has a special colouring. Some of the syllables have significant moves of tone up and down. Each syllable bears a definite amount of loudness. Pitch movements are inseparably connected with loudness. Together with the tempo of speech they form an intonation pattern which is the basic unit of intonation.

An intonation pattern contains one nucleus and may contain other stressed or unstressed syllables normally preceeding or following the nucleus. The boundaries of an intonation pattern may be marked by stops of phonation, that is temporal pauses.

Intonation patterns serve to actualize syntagms in oral speech.

The intonation pattern is divided into several parts:

1. pre-head (unaccented syllables before the first accented ones);

2. head (from the first stressed syllable up to the nucleus);

3. nucleus (the kinetic tone);

4. tail (unstressed syllables after the nucleus);

The nuclear tone is the most important part of the intonation pattern without which the latter cannot exist at all. On the other hand an intonation pattern may consist of one syllable which is its nucleus.

According to “A Course of English Intonation” by J.D.O’Connor, the basic tunes of English are: the Glide Down, the Interrupted Glide Down, the High Jump, the Glide Up, the High Dive.

Prof.Arakin introduces one more basic tone : the High Rise.

4. Fundamental Intonation Patterns and their Use.

1. The Glide Down (the Low Fall): This intonation pattern is used:

1.In statements, final, categoric, calm, reserved.

2.In special questions, calm, serious, flat, reserved, very often unsympathetic.

3 In imperatives, calm, unemotional, serious.

4.In exclamations, calm, unsurprised, reserved.

2. The Interrupted Glide Down (the Accidental Rise: This intonation pattern is used if the speaker wants to make one word of the descending head more prominent than the others he pronounces it a little higher than the preceding syllables thus breaking their descending succession. This non-final rise is called accidental. It never occurs on the first stressed syllable as this syllable is always the highest in the descending head.

3. The High Jump (the High Fall): This intonation pattern is used:

   1. In statements, conveying personal concern or involvement, sounding lively, interested, airy; very common in conversation.

   2. In questions: a) in special questions, sounding lively, interested.

b) in general questions, conveying mildly surprised acceptance of the listener’s premises.

3. In imperatives, sounding warm.

4. In exclamations, very emotional.

4. The Glide Up (the Low Rise ): This intonation pattern is used:

   1. In statements, not categoric, non-final, soothing, reassuring, (in echoes) questioning, sometimes surprised.

   2. In questions: a) in special questions, expressing sympathy, interest; with the nuclear tone on the interrogative word, puzzled.

5. The High Rise: This tune is used in questions echoing, calling for repetition or additional information, it may express disapproval, puzzlement.

6. The High Dive (the Fall-Rise) – This intonation pattern is used:

1. In statements, expressing concern, reproach, contradiction, correction, hurt feelings, sometimes soothing;

The Fall-Rise is also used in non-final intonation-groups or in sentences of different communicative types instead of the low-rising nuclear tone to draw particular attention to one of the words for the purpose of contrast or to intensify the significance of the communicative centre.

Questions for self-control:

1. What are the structural elements of prosody?

2. What is rhythm as a linguistic notion?

3. What does the type of rhythm depend on in speech?

4. What do intonation patterns serve in speech?

5. What are the parts of the intonation pattern?

6. What are the fundamental intonation patterns and their semantic functions in English?

Lecture 12.

PHONOSTYLISTICS AND ITS PROBLEMS.

1. Phonostylistics and its development.

2. Extrzlinguistic situation and its main constituents.

3. The problem of classification of phonetic style.

1. Phonostyliscs and its development.

The branch of phonetics which studies stylistic variations in learning, understanding and producing language is called phonostylistics.

Phonostylistics studies the way phonetics means are used in this or that particular situation which exercises the conditioning influence of a set of factors which are referred to as extralinguistic. The aim of phonostylistics is to analyze all possible kinds of spoken utterances with the main purpose of identifying the phonetic features, both segmental and suprasegmental, which are restricted to certain kinds of contexts, to explain why such features have been used and to classify them into categories based upon a view of their function.

It is taken to be reasonably obvious t5hat much of what people say depends directly or indirectly on the situation they are in. The nature of this dependency can be termed extralinguistic. Nobody would want to deny the fact that spoken speech is the primary medium of language expression. So when linguists became involved in investigating language in use they realized that language is not an isolated phenomenon, it is a part of society. In real life people find themselves in various and numerous situations. In these situations language is used appropriately, i.e. people select from their total linguistic repertoires those elements which match the needs of particular situations.

The principles of the selection and arrangement, the ways of combining the elements form what is called “the style”.

Style integrates language means constructing the utterance, and at the same time differs on utterance from another. The branch of linguistics that is primarily concerned with the problems of functional styles is called functional stylistics. Stylistics is usually regarded as a specific division of linguistics concerned not with the elements of the language as such but with their expressive potential.