Functional aspect of prosody

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 778.

The functions of prosody are studied with reference to an utterance as the basic communicative unit. Information carries independent meaning of its own, regardless of the words and the grammatical structure of the utterance. Most often intonation provides important information which is not given by any other feature of the utterance. The basic functions are: constitutive; distinctive; identificatory. 1)The constitutive function performs utterances as communicative units. Makes out of separate words a separate speech unity; it combines words in such a way that they become meaningful. Constitutes phonetic style of speech. 2)Distinctive function manifests itself through a number of subfunctions depending on the meaning which is differenciated -communicative – distinctive function helps to distinguish the communicative type of utterance (Don't be late! HF – strict command, LR – polite request). -modal-distinctive function helps to distinguish modal meanings of utterances (certainty/uncertainty) and speaker's attitude (reserved or interested attitude). Modal verbs can be expressed by modal verbs (grammatical means) and modal words (lexical). (eg Thank you. HF – genuing, RF – irony, sarcasm. Thus, intonation is a crucial factor in determining the modal meanings of the utterance. In actual speech the listener is more interested in the speaker's tone than his words). -culminative-distinctive. This function helps to single out the semantically important words of the utterance and its semantic nucleus. This function is often called logical, or grammatical notion of the “theme-rheme” organization of the phrase. The theme is what already known while Rheme is some new information. (eg He ‘lost his \ glasses. He has \lost his ,glasses. (lost, not found)). In such utterances the “theme-rheme” structure's distinguished only by prosody. -syntactical-distinctive helps to distinguish syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations of words in sentences. (eg Казнить нельзя помиловать/Smiling Tom entered the classroom/Smiling Tom entered the classroom). -stylistic-distinctive function when prosody differenciated pronunciation styles determined by certain extra linguistic factors (речь чела в данный момент обуславлтвается опред ситуацией). 3)Identificatory function provides the bases for the hearer to identify the communicative and the modal type of the utterance. Its semantic and syntactical structure with the situation of discourse. All the functions of intonation are performed simultaneously and cannot be separated from one another. They show that utterance prosody is linguistically important and meaningful.