1)_ The prosodic characteristics of speech are those of pitch, loudness and speed. These combine together to make up the rhythm of speech and are combined in turn with stretches of silence to break up the flow of speech.
Prosodic characteristics are the same in all languages. It is true of all human societies that speaker speed up when they are exited or impatient and slowdown when they are being thoughtfull or weighty.
Different languages differ in their prosodic characteristics.
Stess is realized by a combination of loudness, pitch and duration. Some languaes use stress placement lexically (to distinguish between different words in the dictionary). Other languages do not use stress lexically.
In English there are a few pairs of words distinguished just by stress. The English habit of weakening unstressed vowels means that most pairs of words differing in stress often also have differences in their vowel sounds. So that the distinction is not carried by stress alone.
Tone is another prosidic characteristic, being realized by differences in the pitch of the voice. A high pitch results from the rapid vibration of the vocal folds in the larynx, loud pitch, slow vibration.
2)_ Intonation is the melody of speech. In studying intonation we study how the pitch of the voice rises and falls, and how speakers use this pitch variation to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning. It also involves the study of the rhythm of speech, and the study of how the interplay of accented, stressed and unstressed syllables function as a framework onto which the entonation patterns are attached.
If we had no intonation, our speech would be monotonous.
3)_ Pitch concerns the varying height of the pitch of the voice over one syllable or over a number of successive syllables. It is the prosodic feature most centrally involved in entonation. Physiologically, pitch is primarily dependant on the rate of vibration of the vocal folds within the larynx. The frequency of vibration involves accoustic measurement, which pitch is used as a perceptual term, relating to listeners judgements as to whether a sound is "high" or "low", whether a sound is "higher" or "lower" than another, and by how much and whether the voice is going "up" or "down".
4)_ Many of the world's languages are tone languages, in which substituting one distinctive tone for another on a particular word or morpheme can cause a change in the lexical meaning of that word or morpheme or in some aspects of its gramatical categorization. Although tones or pitch differences are used for other purposes, English is one of the languages that don't use tone in this way. Languages such as English are sometimes called intonation languages. In tone languages the main suprasegmental contrastive unit is the tone, which usually linked to the fonological unit that we call the syllable. Someone analysing the function and distribution of tones in a tone language would be mainly occupied in examining utterances syllable by syllable, looking at each syllable as an independently variable item.
For the porpuses of analysing intonation, a unit generally greater in size than the syllable is needed, and this unit is called tone-unit.
5)_ Form of English intonation:
As concerns intonation, speakers of English face three types of decision as they speaks.They are: how to break the material up into chunks, what is to be accented, and what tones are to be used. These linguistic intonation systems are known respectively as tonality, tonicity and tone.
Tonality. Is the division of the spoken material into chunks. There is an intonation pattern associated with each chunk. The chunks are known as intonation phrases or IPs. Each IP in an atterance has its own intonation pattern (tune). In general, we make each clause into a separate IP.
Because she was late / she couldn`t get the job.
Tonicity.Speakers use intonation to highlight some words as important for the meaning they wish to convey. These are the words on which the speaker focuses the hearer's attention. To highlight an important word we accent it. More precisely, we accent its stressed syllable/s. That is to say, we add pitch prominence (a change in pitch, or the biginning of a pitch movement) to the rhythmic prominence that a stressed syllable bears.
The nucleus is the more important accent in the IP.It indicates the end of the focused part of the material. In terms of pitch it is marked out by being the place where the pitch change or pitch movement for the nuclear tone begin.
You`ll HAVE to go BACK.
The nucleus is usually placed at the end of the IP. The part of the IP that follows the nucleus is called the tail.
If an IP contains an accent in the part before the nucleus, the first accent is called the onset. The part extending from the onset to the last syllable before the nucleus is called the head. The part before the onset is called the prehead.
She was TOtally eXAUSted.
Tone. Is the kind of pitch movement a speaker choose to say an utterance. A speaker can choose several possible tones: fall, rise, fall-rise.
6)_ The Functions of intonation are:
Attitudinal function: Intonation enables us to express emotions and attitudes as we speak,and this adds a special kind of "meaning" to spoken language. The same sentences can be said in different ways, which might be labelled "angry", "happy", "grateful", "bored".
a) different voice qualities
b) different pitch range in different ways
c) different keys: high, mid or low key
Fall intonation gives an impression of finality : e.g. This is the end of the news
Rise intonation conveys an impression that something more is followed: e.g. I have to leave now
Accentual: Intonation helps to produce the effect of prominence on syllables that need to be perceived as stressed and in particular the placing of tonic stress on a particular syllable marks out the word to which it belongs as the most important in the tone unit. Intonation works to focus attention on a particular lexical item or syllable. While word stress is independent of intonation, the placement of tonic stress is a function of intonation.
The location of the tonic syllable is of considerable linguistic importance. The most common position for this is on the last lexical word (noun, adjective, verb, adverb) of the tone unit.
For contrastive purposes, any word may become the bearer of the tonic syllable. It is frequently said that the placement of the tonic syllable indicates the focus of the information.e.g. She was wearing a blue DRESS.
Grammatical: the listener is better able to recognise the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said by using the information contained in the intonation; for example, such things as the placement of boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences, the difference between questions and statements, and the use of grammatical subordination may be indicated.
//Those who sold QUICKLY// made a PROfit. (a profit was made by those who sold quickly)
//Those who SOLD//quickly made a PROfit. (a profit was quickly made by those who sold)
Discourse:looking at the act of speaking in a broader way, we can see that intonation can signal to the listener what is to be taken as "new" information and what is already "given", can suggest when the speaker is indicating some sore of contrast or link with material in another tone unit and in conversation, can convey to the listener what kind of response is expected.
//She went to SCOTland//
7)_ English intonation is systematic according to the usage of tonality, tonicity and tone. In the same way, it is characteristic because it is natural of English as a language. English is an intonation language.
When we speak, we are transmiting a message, linguistic information conveyed by our intonation, therefore intonation is important according to its linguistical significance. That is why we say intonation is significant.
8)_ Studing intonation in relation to discourse makes it possible to explain much more comprehensible the uses that speakers make of intonation. The study of sequences of tone-units in the speech of one speaker can reveal information carried by intonation which not have been recognised if intonation were analysed only at the level of individual tone units.
Nelle, Sollange
Lopez, Gimena
Rodriguez, Nadia
Parano, Nadia
Racedo, Juana
Farfan, Alejandro
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