Utterance stress, its types and problems of classification. The interrelation of word-stress and utterance-stress

Intonation group as a meaningful unit in speech communication. Functional parts of the intonation group and their semantic loading. Possible types of intonation groups in English. Different systems of graphical notation of information.

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.

Suprasegmental phonology is concerned with such aspects of phonology as tone, stress and intonation. Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Such tonal phonemes are sometimes called tonemes.

Intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. (Compare tone.) Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody.

All languages use pitch pragmatically, that is, as intonation, for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use pitch to distinguish words in addition to intonation.

Definitions of intonation:

1) it is the way in which the level of the voice changes in order to add meaning to what is being said. The level of a person’s voice is changed to show different attitudes, for example, to show sarcasm, impatience, anger or disbelief. 2) It is the music of a language. It is perhaps the most important element of a correct accent. 3) It is variation of pitch whilst speaking which is not used to distinguish words. 4) It means that the pattern or melody of pitch changes in connected speech, esp. the pitch pattern of a sentence, which distinguishes kinds of sentences.

16. Intonation and prosody. Prosodic subsystems, their acoustic and auditory properties. Functions of intonation/prosody and their subsystems.

Prosody or prosodic features of language is a term that refers collectively to variations in pitch, loudness, tempo and rhythm. These features are also called supra-segmental. They convey information that the words do not consist of.

On perception level, intonation is a complex unity formed by significant variations of pitch, loudness and tempo. Thus, prosody and intonation relate to each other as a more general notion (prosody) and its part (intonation).

Prosody is concerned with three matters:

1) with the ways in which an utterance is broken into “chucks”(tone units/ tone group/ intonation group).

2) With the position of accent – the emphasis that makes one syllable more prominent than other syllables, and therefore makes one word more prominent than the other words in the tone unit.

3) With the intonation or melody – the patterned way in which the pitch of the voice changes in the utterance.

Prosodic functions:

Focus – prosody can highlight one particular word in an utterance and thus make other words less significant by comparison.

1) Role in discourse – prosodic elements can indicate the role of an utterance within a larger discourse.

2) Intention of speaker – prosody can make a difference in the way the elements of an utterance are to be interpreted, in the grammatical nature of the whole utterance.

A complex unity of speech melody, sentence-stress, rhythm, tempo, and timbre is called intonation.

Speech melody is the changes in the pitch of the voice in connected speech. It makes the pitch component of intonation. It makes the core of the intonation system.

Sentence stress is the greater prominence of one or more words among other words in the sentence. It makes the force component of intonation.

The temporal component of intonation manifests itself in pauses, duration and rhythm.

Speech tempo is the relative speed of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession and the number and duration of pauses in the sentence. The average rate delivery may contain from about 2 to 4 syllables per second for slow speech/lento, from about 3 to 6 syllables for normal speech, and from about 5 to 9 syllables for fast speech/allegro.

Rhythm is a regular recurrence of stressed syllables.

Functions of intonation acc to David Crystal:

-emotional – to express a wide range of attitudinal meanings.

-grammatical – to mark grammatical contrasts.

-information structure – to convey what is new and what is already known in the meaning of an utterance.

-textual – to construct larger than an utterance stretches of discourse.

-psychological – to organize l-ge into units that are more easily perceived and memorized.

-Indexical – to serve as markers of personal identities.

Functions of intonation acc to Peter Roach:

-attitudinal – intonation enables us to express emotions and attitudes as we speak, and this adds a special kind of ‘meaning’ to spoken l-ge.

-accentual – intonation helps to produce the effect of prominence on syllables that need to be perceived as stressed, and in particular the placing of tonic stress on a particular syllable marks out the word to which it belongs as the most important in a tone unit.

-grammatical – the listener is better able to recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said by using the information contained in the intonation.

-discourse – intonation can signal to the listener what is to be taken as new information and what is already given, can suggest when the speaker is indicating some sort of contrast or link with material in another tone-unit and, in conversation, can convey to the listener what kind of response is expected.

When we look at continuous speech in English utterances we find that different tones can only be identified on a small number of particularly prominent syllables. For the purposes of analyzing intonation, a unit generally greater in size than the syllable is needed, and this unit is called tone-unit/intonation group/sense group. In its smallest form the tone-unit may consist of only one syllable. One of the stressed syllables in the tone-group, which has the greater prominence than the others, forms the nucleus/focal point. The nuclear tone is obligatory and the most important part of the intonation pattern without which it cannot exist. Tone is a pitch contour that begins on an accented syllable and continues to the end of a tone group: that is, up to but not including the next stressed syllable. Simple tones move only in one direction: fall or rise. The number of nuclear tones varies from 2 to 16. According to R.Kingdon the most important nuclear tones are:

Low Fall, High Fall, Low Rise, High Rise, Fall-Rise.

Roughly speaking the falling tone of any level and range expresses ‘certainty’, ‘completeness’, ‘independence’, it has an air of finality. A rising tone expresses ‘uncertainty’, ‘incompleteness’, ‘dependence’. A general question, for example, has a rising tone. Parenthetical and subsidiary information in a statement is also often spoken with a rising tone, or a mid-level tone, for this information is incomplete, being dependent for its full understanding on the main assertion. Encouraging or polite denials, commands, invitations, greetings, farewells are generally spoken with rising tone. A falling-rising tone may combine the falling tone’s meaning of assertion, certainty with the rising tone’s meaning of dependence, incompleteness. At the end of a phrase it often conveys the feeling of reservation. In the beginning or in the middle of a phrase it is a more forceful alternative to the rising tone, expressing the assertion of one point, together with the implication that another point is to follow. The falling-rising tone consists of a fall in pitch followed by a rise. If the nucleus is the last syllable of the intonation group the fall and rise both take place on one syllable – the nuclear syllable. Otherwise the rise occurs in the remainder of the tone unit. The tone of a nucleus determines the pitch of the rest of the intonation pattern following it which is called tail. Thus, after a falling tone the rest of the intonation pattern is at a low pitch and vice versa. The nucleus and a tail form a terminal tone. The other sections of intonation pattern are pre-head and head, they form the pre-nuclear part of intonation pattern and are optional elements. There are 3 types of pre-nucleus: descending, ascending, level.

There are a variety of methods for recording intonation patterns in writing. The first three methods reflect variations in pitch only:

-The method introduced by Ch.Fries involves drawing a line around the sentence to show relative pitch heights.

-According to the second method syllables are written at different heights across the page.

-Acc to the ‘levels’ method a number of discrete levels of pitch are recognized, and the utterance is marked accordingly.

-The fourth method is favoured by most British phoneticians. Here not only variations of pitch but also stressed syllables are marked. Distinct modifications of pitch in the nuclear syllable are indicated by special symbols (downward or upward arrow or a slantwise stress mark). Pitch movements in the prenuclear part can be indicated too.

In a sentence or an intonation group some words are of greater importance than the others. Words which provide most of the information are called notional words. Content words are brought out in speech by means of sentence-stress(utterance stress). Utterance stress is a special prominence given to one or more words according to their relative importance in a sentence/utterance.

In all l-ges stress serves a obvious deictic function which is to signal important information for th listeners. General rule in all l-ges is that the most important information in a phrase or longer utterance will be highlighted, that is will receive prominence through some kind of accentuation of a particular word or group of words. This accentuation may involve a noticeable:

1. change in a pitch

2. increase in duration or length of a syllable

3. increase in loudness

4. combination of 1 -3

In English all three of the prosodic features occur together to signal prominence.Usually the content words (nouns, verbs, adj, adv) are accentuated, the function words (prep, art, pron) or affixes are de-emphasized or backgrounded. Function words can be emphasized when they are at the end of the sentence, used for emphasis, used for contrast. Because they are unstressed in the stream of speech, function words exhibit vatious forms of reduction. The main function of sentence stress is to single out the communicative centre of the sentence which introduces the information. The stressed word in a given sentence which the speaker wishes to highlight receives prominence and is referred to as the semantic centre. When a conversation begins, the semantic centre is usually on the last content word. Words in a sentence can express new or old information. Words that express old information are unstressed, words that express new information are spoken with strong stress. The speaker can give words focus to contrast information; words which are contrasted have contrastive stress. The speaker can place special emphasis on a particular element – emphatic stress. The element receiving emphatic stress usually communicates new information within the sentence. English has certain anaphoric words whose function is to repeat a given information in a different way. They are typically not accented. Anaphoric words: he, she, it, they, one, some, one, ones, so, not, there, then, do.

The function of sentence stress is different and more complicated than of word stress. Word stress indicates the strongest syllable in a word, when sentence stress indicates the end of the syntagm, indicates the important words in a syntagm.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-31