Components of an intonation pattern.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 951.

Intonation is a complex unity of communicatively relevant variations in voice pitch, stress, tempo (duration, pauses, and rhythm) and timbre. Rhythm may be included in the definition of intonation as a component of its own since investigations show that it is not a purely temporal phenomenon. Rhythm - the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Each component can be viewed from the articulatory, auditory, acoustically, functionally point of view. Auticulatory—voice pitch is the result of the work of the vibrator mechanism, producing vibrations. Acoustically—voice pitch is complex periodic vibrations combined with main tone. Fundamental frequency of vibrations is a measuring unit of the voice pitch. Auditory—voice pitch (voice melody) is percepted as significant movements of the voice up and down. Functionally voice pitch manifests itself both at the end of an utterance – in the nucleus as a nuclear tone & within the whole contour. Pitch consists of pronouncing a syllable on a higher pitch level than the others, or in giving that syllable a certain melodic shape: a falling one, a rising one, or a combination of the two. In acoustic terms it means the number of vibrations per second of the vocal cords. Pitch is created by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords.

Stress component

a) Articulatory - stress is inseparably connected with prominence of the words in an utterance – result of the work of the power mechanism

b) Acoustically – it is intensity of the air stream

c) Auditory corresponds to loudness.

d) In phonetic literature the following types of utterance stress are widely used: syntactic, logical, emphatic and rhythmic. But they are not very precise.

9. Tempo - The temporal component of intonation as rate of speech acoustically manifests itself in duration. Tempo of speech is the relative speed or slowness of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession and the number and duration of pauses in a sentence.

10. Functional types of Tempo: normal (moderato), lento, allegro – to differentiate new information –rheme from thе given one- theme.

11. Timbre - The timbre component (or voice quality) may be understood as specially changed voice qualities, which help identify speaker's attitude.