Sociophonetics

LECTURE 6

Summary

The term prosody was originally used in poetics, while intonation was described in linguistics. Today both terms may be applied to different types of discourse.

Prosodic features are variations in pitch, loudness, tempo, rhythm, and voice quality. In the Russian linguistic tradition they were all covered by the term intonation as its components: speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm, timbre. In the English tradition only pitch variations used to convey meaning were called intonation. We have to admit that pitch is the most linguistic prosodic feature.

Intonation operates at the linguistic level, starting from a sentence. Prosody operates from the syllable to the whole text. Intonation is more commonly described in its syntactical, attitudinal, accentual and discourse functions. Prosody is more commonly viewed in its structural and social (indexical) functions.

What we hear as pitch, loudness, length, voice quality may be measured acoustically as fundamental frequency, intensity, duration, spectral characteristics. Thus perceptual features have their acoustic correlates.

Intonation features shared by all the languages are called universal; when typical of a group of languages they are typological, others are language-specific.

Universal are intonation groupings, nucleus placement, nuclear tones in statements and questions, declination, intonation of emotions, indexical features of status and style, intonation acquisition.

Language-specific are realizational features in pitch configurations, in tone usage, in the length of intonation groups. English and Russian have a lot in common in their intonation systems but certain cultural differences and tone configurations are important to consider for successive intercultural communication.

6.1. Geographical variation

6.2. Major accent types: British and Amecican

6.2.1. Vowels

6.2.2. Consonants

6.2.3. Word stress

6.2.4. Rhythm

6.2.5. Intonation

6.2.6. British regional features

6.2.7. American regional features

6.3. Social factors and social markers

6.4. Situational variation

6.5. Language change in progress

Sociophonetics deals with the way language (or languages) and its varieties function in the speech community, in social environment. In other words, as Joshua Fischer put it, "who speaks, what language, with whom and to what end." Phonetics is interested in the way people's pronunciation forms vary in different social situations. Some of the phonetic changes are instantaneous, some take a long time in completing but most of them are done unconsciously. A phonetitian's task is to observe them, to record, process and analyse them with the purpose of correlating the results with socially significant factors.

Accent variation may be geographical, social and situational.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11