The system of terminal tones in English

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 483.

The prosodic constituters of intonation (pitch, loudness, tempo)

Conversational style

Press-reporting and broadcasting

Complicated and is a strong ideological weapon.

Because of the function (to inform, to present) neutral and objective reporting. Timbre: unemotional, dispassionate, reserved, assured.

Prosodic features: loudness, pauses, rate, rhythm.

Informal + silent language

Incompleteness, lack or planning, non-fluency, mistakes in grammar, vocabulary, varied tempo, chaotic intonation.

! phone calls vs formal !

"Intonation is the soul of a language while the pronunciation of its sounds is its body" [Kingdon 1972: xiii].

D.Crystal arranged all the components of intonation into a list (starting from the most relevant component to the least): speech melody (or pitch movement), phrasal stress, tempo, rhythm, tambre (or timbre)

Prosody: pitch, loudness and tempo.

Pitch correlates with the fundamental frequency of the vibration of the vocal cords (i.e. perception of the frequency of repeated pressures on the ear-drum).

Loudness correlates with the amplitude of vibrations of vocal cords.

Tempo correlates with time during which a speech unit lasts.

1. Static or level tones (produced by keeping the vocal cords at a constant tension (thus giving a tone of unvarying pitch). Such tones are used to give emphasis or prominence to a word or syllable without adding any special feeling or meaning to it.

2. Kinetic or moving tones (Such tones express the speaker's feelings in addition to giving prominence.

Intonation functions: accentual, indexical, communicative (grammatical), modal (attitudinal), contextual, stylistic