«Интонация английской речи. Ритм. Темп и паузы»

The Components of Intonation

Intonation is a complex unity of speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm and voice tamber.

I. Speech Melody

It is the same as the pitch of the voice. The changing of the pitch is connected with different tones: level tones, moving tones, simple tones and complex tones.

II. Sentence - Stress

In a sentence or an intonation group some of the words are of greater importance than the others. This largely depends on the situation or context. Words which provide most of the information are brought out in speech by means of sentence - stress. Thus sentence - stress is a special prominence given to one or more words according to their relative importance in a sentence. The main function of sentence - stress is to single out the communicative centre of the sentence which introduces new information. The prominence is realised by variations of pitch, loudness, length and quality.

We differentiate three types of sentence - stress:

normal (or syntactical) sentence - stress

logical sentence - stress

emphatic sentence – stress

1. Normal stress affects content words which convey the necessary information to the listener. Normal sentence - stress is used to arrange words into sentences or intonation groups phonetically. Together with the lexical and grammatical means it expresses the general idea of the sentence and indicates its communicative centre.

2. Logical stress. The position of the sentence - stress determines the place of the Tonic Syllable as the communicative centre. By shifting the position of the stress we can change the place of the communicative centre. The type of sentence - stress which gives special prominence to a new element in a sentence is called logical stress. The word which is singled out by the logical stress is the most important in the sentence. It is the communicative centre (or logical centre) of the sentence which bears the tone.

3. Emphatic stress. Most utterances express not only the speaker's thoughts, but also his feelings and attitudes to reality and to the contents of the sentence. Both normal and logical stresses can be unemphatic or emphatic. Emphatic stress increases the effort of expression. It may strengthen те stressed word making it more prominent. Emphatic stress is a powerful expressive means. It is the highest degree of logical and emotional prominence of words in a phrase.

III. Tempo of Speech

By speech tempo we mean the relative speed of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession and the number and duration of pauses in a sentence. Every speaker has a norm which characterises his usual individual style of utterance. Some people speak more quickly, some more slowly; some people use more variations of tempo than others. Tempo is a feature, which like loudness can be varied from time to time by the individual speaker.

The rate of speaking varies constantly. The speed of utterance becomes slower or faster according to the number of unstressed syllables between the stressed ones. Differences of rate are used to help the listener to differentiate the more important (slow rate) and the less important (fast rate) parts of the utterance.

Variations of rate of speech and pausation are closely connected with different phonetic styles, shades of meaning and the structure of the intonation group. By pause we generally mean an act of stopping in the flow of speech. In speaking or reading aloud, we make pauses from time to time. These pauses break our speech or texts into paragraphs, sentences, intonation groups. A short interval of silence arising from doubt or uncertainty, a hesitation caused by different emotions, forgetfulness, one's wish to think over what to say next is called a hesitation pause.

IV. Rhythm

Rhythm is generally measured in regular flow of speech in which stressed and unstressed syllables occur at definite intervals. There are two kinds of speech rhythm: syllable-timed rhythm and stress-timed rhythm. Every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other. French and Japanese, for example, are syllable-timed languages, they depend on the principle that all syllables are of equal value.

Rhythm in English, Russian and some other stress-timed languages is based primarily on the alteration of strongly and weakly stressed syllables. Within each intonation group the stressed syllables occur at fairly equal intervals of time. The unstressed syllables, whether many or few, occupy approximately the same time between the stresses. The greater number of unstressed syllables there is between the stressed ones the more weakly and rapidly they are pronounced. The unstressed vowels in this case have a noticeably different quality - they are shortened and weakened. The influence of rhythm is very important. The time given to each rhythmic group tends to be unchanged though the number of unstressed syllables may be many or few. Each rhythmic group within an intonation group is given the same amount of time. If there are many unstressed syllables in a rhythmic group, they must be pronounced more quickly.

To acquire a good English speech rhythm one should arrange sentences into intonation groups and then into rhythmic groups; link every word beginning with a vowel to the preceding word; weaken unstressed words and syllables, making the stressed syllables occur regularly within an intonation group.

V. The Tamber of the Voice

The tamber of the voice quality is a special colouring of the speaker's voice. It is used to express various emotions and moods, such as joy, anger, sadness, indignation, etc. The tamber of the voice is a very important index of the style. It is smth peculiar, very easily identified. According to the style of speech the voice tamber may be businesslike, interested, passionate, authoritative, self-assured, emotionally rich or personally involved. Tamber should not be correlated with the voice quality only, it is a more general concept. Tamber is studied according to the quality of the sound: breathy, whisper, creak, husky; and qualification: laugh, giggle, sob, cry.

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к практическому занятию № 6

по теме «Интонация английской речи.

Ритм. Темп и паузы»

1. What is the utterance?

2. What is the tone-unit?

3. What is the smallest form of the tone-unit?

4. What do we call a syllable, which carries a tone?

5. What is the Tonic Syllable?

6. What is the Head?

7. What is the Pre-Head?

8. What is the Tail?

9. What is the structure of the tone-unit?

10. What can you say about speech rhythm?

11. What can you say about tempo of speech?

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