The components of intonation.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 546.

Indexical function

Psychological function

Textual function

Intonation helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere. In radio news-reading, paragraphs of information can be shaped through the use of pitch.

Intonation helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize.

Intonation, along with other prosodic features, is an important marker of personal or social identity.

The pitch component or speech melody – the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place when voice sounds, especially vowels and sonorants, are pronounced in connected speech.

The pitch parameters consist of distinct variations in:

direction of pitch, pitch level, pitch range.

According to Roger Kingdon the most important nuclear tones in English relevant for the teaching practice are: Low Fall, High Fall, Low Rise, High Rise, Fall-Rise,Rise-Fall.

Sentence stress/utterance stressis the greater prominence of one or more words among other words in the sentence. It makes the force component of intonation.

We may distinguish the following three kinds of pauses:

— Short pauseswhich may be used to separate intonation groups within a phrase.

— Longer pauseswhich normally manifest the end of the phrase.

— Very long pauses, which are approximately twice as long as the first type, are used to separate phonetic wholes.

Syntactic pausesseparate phonopassages, phrases, and intonation groups.

Emphatic pausesserve to make especially prominent certain parts of the utterance.

Hesitation pausesare mainly used in spontaneous speech to gain some time to think over what to say next. They may be silent or filled.