Utterance stress and Rhythm

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 446.

Sentence stress is the second component of prosody. It's a certain prominence given to one or more words in a sentence, that are semantically more important than the others. The effect of stress is produced by vibration in pitch, loudness. Length and quality. The subsystem of utterance stress in English includes 3 basic types: nuclear stress; non-nuclear stress; partial stress. The main difference between them is how the syllables that carry them are marked. Nuclear stress is marked by the kinetic tones, non-nuclear stressed syllables are marked by static tones, partially stressed syllables are not pitch prominent. Their pitch characteristics depend on the pitch pattern of the preceding fully stressed syllable. The distribution of stress in a phrase is determined by several factors: semantic factor (notional parts of speech are usually stressed, auxiliary parts of speech are not). The stresses are on those words to which the speaker wants to attract special attention. Thus, the semantic factor determines the location, the type and the degree of stress. (! The nuclear tone attracts more attention than static tone of fully stressed in an utterance); grammatical factor (eg You must do it?/Must you do it? ( The inverted word order presupposes the appearance of the stress on the words which are not usually stressed); rhythmical (eg safe and sound; neat and tidy; slim and slender). English speakers favor the constructions that have rhythmic alternation (чередование). Rhythm.It is considered to be the third component of prosody. Though rhythmic units have different number of syllables they tend to follow one another at regular intervals. In rhythmic groups of unequal length the syllables of the longer groups are compressed by very rapid pronunciation. And the syllables of shorter ones are subconsciously lengthen to confirm a certain interval (eg Peter went to London./Peter has gone to London./Peter must have gone to London.).