INTONATION, ITS COMPONENTS AND FUNCTIONS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 780.

Intonation is a unity of:

ü speech melody (variations in the pitch of the voice)

ü timbre (tonal colouring of the speaker's voice)

ü sentence stress (relative degree of prominence given to various words in a sentence)

ü temporal characteristics(duration, pauses, tempo)

ü rhythm(periodic recurrence of rhythmic units of different size and level).

Functions of Intonation:

1) Delimiting –delimitation of utterances and parts of utterances in the speech flow

2) Syntactical – reflecting the syntactical relations in the sentence

3) Accentual – indicating more or less important elements of the utterance through contrasts in the degree of prominence of its different parts

4) Attitudinal (modal) – conveying the speaker's attitude to the subject-matter and to the communicative situation

5) Communicative – indicating the communicative type of an utterance

Speech melody deals with the elements of an intonation group and tones. The elements of an intonation group are:

§ the Nucleus(= the nuclear tone )– the basic element of the intonation group;

§ the Head (=the scale) – tonetic unit beginning with the first stressed syllable and ending before the nucleus;

§ the Pre-Head – variations in unstressed or partially stressed syllables before the Head;

§ the Tail– unstressed or partially stressed syllables following the last strongly stressed syllable in the intonation group.

Tones are divided into two classes since they may be pronounced in the following quite distinct ways:

1) by keeping the vocal cords at a constant tension thus producing a tone of unvarying pitch (such tones are known as static or level).

1) by varying the tension of the vocal cords thus producing a tone of varying pitch (such tones are known as kinetic or dynamic).

According to the actual height within the speaker's voice range static (level) tones may be high, mid, low.

Kinetic tones are generally classified according to the following principles:

1) the direction of the pitch change (fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall);

2) the width of the pitch change, or its interval (wide, narrow);

3) the relative position of the pitch change within the speaker's voice range.