Rhythm and tempo

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 575.

Rhythm – a general term, connected with time and space. Realized in lexical, syntactical and prosodic means and their combinations: word repetition, syntactical parallelism, intensification are perceived as rhythmical on lexical, syntactical and prosodic levels.

Type of rhythm depends on the language:

Syllable-timed (French, Spanish, and other Romance lang-s ) - speaker gives equal amount of time to each syllable.

Stress-timed (Germanic lang-s as English, German, Russian.) – rhythm is based on a larger unit than syllable. Stressed syllables are pronounced and equal intervals, no matter how many unstressed syllables are between them.

Speech rhythm is usually considered to be a recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in speech continuum.

Basic unit – a rhythmic group – a speech segment that contains a stressed syllable and unstressed syll-s attached to it. Stressed syll is a prosodic nucleus of the rhythmic group.

Initial unstressed syllables preceding nucleus – proclitics, the following ones – enclitics.

Tempo – expresses different degrees of importance in utterance, emotional state. Tempo increases when giving highly emotional statements and slows down in less emotional state.