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. 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. 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. The actual semantic weight of the individual words acquiring prominence stress in an utterance is different. This difference depends 1 on the novelty of information and 2 on the importance of information.
First of all, there is the opposition of n u c 1 e a r and non-nuclear pre-nuclear or post-nuclear types of stress. From a functional point of view nuclear stress is the only obligatory stress in an intonation-group and signals the central point of information.
Depending on the context or the communication situation some words appear to contribute more information than others. The special prominence given to one or more words in an utterance is called utterance stress. Stress is part of the phonetic structure of the word. We always know the place of stress in a word. When the word is made prominent in an utterance, stress becomes a feature of the utterance. The means, with the help of which the special prominence is achieved and the effect of stress is produced, are variations of pitch, loudness, length and quality.
Acoustically, utterance stress is determined by variations of frequency, intensity, duration and formant structure. Duration also appears to play a greater role than intensity. Together with grammatical and lexical means it expresses the general idea of the sentence and indicates its communicative center. The nuclear syllable is generally associated with the last content word of the intonation group.
The position of the last utterance stress determines the place of the nucleus of the communicative center. By shifting the position of the last stress we can change the place of the nucleus of the communicative center.
The type of utterance stress, which gives special prominence to a new element in a sentence or an intonation group is called logical stress special, shifting, corrective.
The logical stress is one of the most expressive means of oral speech. Both normal and logical stresses can be unemphatic or emphatic emotional. Emphatic stress increases the effort of expression. These features are also called supra-segmental. They convey information that the words do not consist of. On perception level , intonation is a complex unity formed by significant variations of pitch, loudness and tempo.
Thus, prosody and intonation relate to each other as a more general notion prosody and its part intonation. Focus — prosody can highlight one particular word in an utterance and thus make other words less significant by comparison. A complex unity of speech melody, sentence-stress, rhythm, tempo, and timbre is called intonation.
Speech melody is the changes in the pitch of the voice in connected speech. It makes the pitch component of intonation. It makes the core of the intonation system. Sentence stress is the greater prominence of one or more words among other words in the sentence. It makes the force component of intonation.
Speech tempo is the relative speed of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession and the number and duration of pauses in the sentence. When we look at continuous speech in English utterances we find that different tones can only be identified on a small number of particularly prominent syllables. In its smallest form the tone-unit may consist of only one syllable. The nuclear tone is obligatory and the most important part of the intonation pattern without which it cannot exist.
Tone is a pitch contour that begins on an accented syllable and continues to the end of a tone group: that is, up to but not including the next stressed syllable. Simple tones move only in one direction: fall or rise. The number of nuclear tones varies from 2 to According to R. Kingdon the most important nuclear tones are:. A general question, for example, has a rising tone. Parenthetical and subsidiary information in a statement is also often spoken with a rising tone, or a mid-level tone, for this information is incomplete, being dependent for its full understanding on the main assertion.
Encouraging or polite denials, commands, invitations, greetings, farewells are generally spoken with rising tone.
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