Tempo and pauses

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 414.

Tempo – the rate of utterance. On the acoustic level tempo is measured by the number of syllables per second. Tempo is determined by different factors. It may differ depending on: the size of the audience; the acoustic quality of the room; the individuality of the speaker. Tempo can express speaker's attitudes, emotions (fast – anxiety, excitement; very slow – relax, indifferent, calm, tired). The rate of speech can be of 3 types: Normal; Slow; Fast. The speech continuum is divided into smaller portions by means of pauses. Pause – a short period of time when sound stops before starting again. Pauses are closely related with tempo. The number and length of pauses influence the general tempo of speech. Pauses can be of 3 types: silent pauses (a complete stop of phonation); pauses of perception (there is no period of silence. The effect of such pause is created by a sharp change in pitch direction or by variations in duration. They ate often called syntactical pauses. In the text it is marked by a wavy line by the junctions of intonation group – eg The teacher says John is a bright student); voiced=filled pauses (have the quality most often of central vowel. They are called hesitation pauses = pauses of doubt). Silent pauses according to their length can be short, long (between 2 utterances), extra long (between paragraphs). Pauses perform segmentative and delimitative functions, also constitutive function, semantic, syntactic role, attitudinal function, for emphasis, to attach special importance to the word.