Intonation. Various approaches

Jones: intonation – variants which take place in the pitch

Lilias Armstrong: Intonation – the rise and fall of the pitch.

Gimson: Intonation – variants of the pitch, rises and falls in pitch level

Intonation helps to determine meaning, gives information about the attitude of the speaker, or how he feels about what he is saying.

Basically intonation is treated theoretically as a notion including one central phonetic item or several intrinsically (по сути) into related phonetic items. The former approach belongs to western phoneticians who consider intonation to be one thing.

According to American school of intonation, intonation is pitch that is differences of pitches which are used in languages to make differences of meaning. From the point of view of pure pitch it seems that a fall may vary continuously in its range.

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And the problem is to decide whether this corresponds to a continuously varying semantic affect or to a limited number of clear differences of meaning. Pitch can be extra high, high, med and low. The use of pitch to distinguish how utterances without interfering with the shape of the component words is known as intonation. It can be called a vertical approach to intonation. Within the speech of a person the contrast of high versus low or fall versus the rise or whatever they may be are significant, e.g.

His car is nice.

Answers:

1. [^\mmm] “I agree”

2. [_Vmmm] “I agree but…”

3. [_|mmm] “What of it?”

4. [^|mmm] “Delicious, lovely (car made of chocolate)”

5. [^/mmm] “Really?”

6. [_/mmm] “What do you mean?”

Differences stem from the differences in pitch, features which are perceptibly different can be grouped separately because of difference of meaning, e.g.

We must visit her soon

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In number one soon is followed by a pose. The statement contains implication. Number two has no following cause and the pattern is reduced to a fall from high to med. The statement sounds decisive.

There is a difficulty in accounting for the ranges of the various rises and falls and their combinations. The attitudinal function of pitch and range allows to study meaningful contrast.

“Very good”

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Number one has restricted high range and it sounds less than enthusiastic.

Number two has restricted low range and it sounds sincere but not emotional.

Number three has a wide range. It sounds both sincere and enthusiastic.

According to a British school of phonetic intonation is a contour representing a tone group that is a unit of intonation consisting structurally of 4 basic parts and each of this parts contains its specific system of contrast. It is a horizontal approach of intonation. A contour contains the pre-head, the head, nucleus and the tail. The last accented syllable of a contour is known as the nucleus. The stretch from the first accented syllable up to the nucleus is called the head. Sometimes the term head is restricted to the first accented syllable and the remainder is called the body. The head may be short or long, e.g. “What rubbish” here the head has one syllable “what”. “How on Earth did you manage to make such a stupid mistake?” Here the head has 14 syllables. The syllables before the first accented syllable are called the pre-head. “You can’t do that” “you” is the pre-head. The pre-head is not usually very long but it may be so when the first accented syllable occurs late in the tone group. The syllables after the last accented syllable are called the tail.

Neither head nor pre-head may occur without the nucleus. On the other hand the nucleus can occur without the head and the pre-head and both head and pre-head may occur independently of each other, e.g. “No!” it contains only nucleus. “What rubbish” – head + nucleus + tail. “It was impossible” – pre-head + nucleus + tail. For a head to occur there must be two accented syllables in the contour and for the pre-head to occur there must be at least one syllable before the first accent.

The meaning of the contour may change with a new choice of nucleus tone and a new placement of the pre-head, head and tale within the voice range. But today not all of these changes are registed and classified.

“What are you doing” “What are you doing”

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Number one is appointed question. Number two is a question sympathetic towards the listener.

“Is it fair?” “Is it fair?”

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Number one has a falling tone. And it is rhetorical. Number two has a rise at the end and it is a true question.

“Did you accept it?” “Did you accept it?”

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In number one the low head implies criticism. In number two the head does not imply any criticism.

Pike ‘in each language the use of pitch fluctuations tends to become semi-standardized or formalised, so that all speakers of the language use basic speech sequences in similar ways under similar circumstances. These abstract characteristic sentence melodies may be called intonation contours’

According to the Russian school of phonetic intonation is many things. It is a complex unity of several phonetic items. By intonation Russian phoneticians usually understand speech melody, pitch, stress, tone, loudness, rhythm, timbre, prolongation, duration, tempo, range, etc. On the surface the approach often looks heterogeneous.

Speech melody (Leontyeva) – variations in the pitch of the voice in connected speech.

Pitch – the degree of highness or lowness varying with the number of vibrations of a note.

As an intonation component rhythm is defined as a regular co-occurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. Rhythm is based on stress. The auditory correlate of stress is loudness, because stressed syllables tend to sound louder than the unstressed. And this is due to stronger muscular effort both respiratory and articulatory. Loudness is based on the amplitude of the vibration of the vocal cord when vowels and consonants containing voice. Loudness is based on the noise created by the stream of air overcoming or breaking the obstruction when voiceless consonants are produced. Rhythm is a dynamic component of intonation. Stress and loudness are its static breaks. Speech melody is represented graphically as a contour.

Lecture 7.

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