Prosodic units

UTTERANCE PROSODY.

Intonation is a complex unity of speech melody, sentence stress, tempo, rhythm and voice timbre, which enables the speaker to express his thoughts, emotions and attitudes towards the contens of the utterance and the hearer. Acoustically, intonation is a complex combination of varying fundamental frequency, intensity and duration. On the art, lvl intonation is also a complex phenomenon. In the production of speech melody the subglotal, laryngeal and supraglotal respiratory muscles regulate the subglotal air-pressure, which makes the vocal cords vibrate. Alongside of the term “intonation” the term “prosody” ia widely used. Procody denotes non-segmental phenomena. Prosodic features as “vocal effects constituted by variations along the parameters of pitch, loudness, duration and silence”. The notion of prosody is broader than the notion of intonation as it can be applied to the utterance, the word, the syllable, whereas prosody of the utterance and intonation are equivalent notions. The phonic substance of prosody is regarded by all phonetitians as the modifications of fundamental frequency, intensity and duration.

One of the basic problems in the study of prosody is to determine the units in which prosodic features are actualized. He syllable is widely recognized to be the smallest prosodic unit. It has no meaning, but it is significant for constituting hierarchically higher prosodic units. P features of the syllable (tone, stress, duration) depend on its position and function in the rhythmic unit and in the utterance. Ther is another unit, which does not express any meaning but is important for realization of rhythm. It is the foot. It always begins with the beat and is actually a unit starting with a stressed syllable and ending before the next stressed syllable. A rhythmic unit is one stressed syllable or a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it. The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic unit. There are as many rhythmic units in an utterance as there are stressed syllables in it. The unstressed syllables are clitics. Those preceding the stressed syllable are called proclitics and those following it – enclitics. The intonation group is higher than the rhythmic unit. It has also been termed “breath group”. Structurally, the IG has some obligatory formal characteristics. There are nuclear stress, on the semantically most important word and the terminal tone. The boundaries between intonation groups are marked by tonal junctures and pauses. The structure of the intonation group varies depending on the number of syllables and rhythmic units in it. Min – 1 syllable (nucleus); max – prehead, head, nucleus, tail. Utteranced are mostly connected and grouped into still larger units – hyperutterances, ph paragraphes and texts.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-31