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Utterance and pausation.Date: 2015-10-07; view: 482. The rate of speech can be normal, slowand fast.The parts of the utterance which are particularly important sound slower. Unimportant parts are commonly pronounced at a greater speed than normal. Any stretch of speech can be split into smaller portions, i.e. phonetic wholes, phrases, intonation groups by means of pauses. By pausehere we mean a complete stop of phonation. It is sufficient to distinguish the following three kinds of pauses: 1. Short pauses which may be used to separate intonation groups within a phrase. 2. Longer pauses which normally manifest the end of the phrase. 3. Very long pauses, which are approximately twice as long as the first type, are used to separate phonetic wholes. Functionally, there may be distinguished syntactic, emphaticand hesitationpauses. Syntactic pauses separate phonopassages, phrases, intonation groups. Emphatic pauses serve to make especially prominent certain parts of the utterance, e.g. She is the most ⌇charming girl I've ever seen. Hesitation pauses are mainly used in spontaneous speech to gain some time to think over what to say next. They may be silent or filled, e.g. She is rather a ... good student. The changes of pitch, loudness and tempo tend to become formalized or standardized, so that all speakers of the language use them in similar ways under similar circumstances.
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