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The function of intonation



 

In all languages speech is temporally organized into stretches of sounds. In English each such stretch is patterned intonationally around one dynamic pitch movement of the voice. A pause indicates the end of one stretch and the beginning of another. Discussing intonation we shall refer only to the va­riation in the direction of a pitch of the voice of the spea­ker. This restriction is very important and such prosodic features as tempo, loudness, timber of the voice will be con­sidered in the next part of the chapter. So here we are going to discuss the organization of the rise and fall in pitch of the voice when the speaker is speaking normally loudly, nor­mally fast and within his normal voice range. All of these norms will clearly vary with each individual speaker but just as with isolated vowel and consonants we may suppose that the intonation we are describing is unmarked (neutral).

At this level of abstraction unmarked intonation pattern presents a sort of intonation used by a speaker in reading a sentence aloud out of context with no indication of any special attitude being given. Let us consider the following utterance.

 

The TWOparties + have got it WIRED + so that it BENEFITSthem now.

 

In each, case the stressed syllable is underlined and the syllable which bears the big pitch movement, the tonic one, is printed in capital letters. Each tonic group con­taining one tonic stress is divided from the next tonic group by a /+/ sign.

In the above sentence the movement of the pitch of the voice on the last tonic syllable in the sentence is greater than that on the previous tonic syllables in the same sentence. The pitch patterning between the tonic syllables serves to mark the unity of the structure which they together form. The func­tion of this patterning is to signal to the listener which tone groups are joined together in some larger structure and where the end of the larger structure comes. The problem here is concentrated on the basis of the utterance division into tonic groups. A clear general trend can be observed which is to put the subject phrase of the sentence into a tone group by itself. The next tendency that we can observe is to put the predicate phrase of the sentence into one tone group un­less the phrase is particularly long, in which case the pre­dicate may be divided into two tone groups as in the following example:

 

The company'sТRADE balance + was in the RED + by a hundred and ninety five million POUNDS.

 

The most likely break is between the two major constituents of the sentence: subject and predicate. This may be explained by the main pragmatic principle of separating the topic (theme) from its interpretation (rheme). The next most likely break will occur within a long subject phrase and/or within a long predicate phrase.

The most general and important function of tone group di­vision is the marking off the coherent syntactic structures which the listener must perceive as units. Very often the dif­ference in the division of an utterance into tonic groups may result in different semantic interpretation. Thus consi­der the following examples:

The boys + who are ill + can’t come – (all the boys)

The boys who are ill + can’t come – (some of the boys)

 

It seems likely that this sort of delicate distinction is usually lost in informal speech where, in any case, the situation will usually make it quite clear how the sentence is to be interpreted. All the tone group divisions are marked not only by the pitch of the voice falling at the end of each tone group but also by a lengthening of the final syl­lable of the tone group so that in this position even an un­stressed syllable is longer than it would be elsewhere in the utterance. Also it is marked by a pause in the stream of speech.

Considering the placing of the tonic stress within each tone group we may state the general tendency to place it on the last lexical item in the tone group. But it isn't always the case. The above considered examples prove it.

The function of the tonic stress is to mark the centre (or focus) of the structure of information in a given tone group. And the importance can be attached to any lexical item in a tonic group if we consider it not at ‘idealized level of reading, but at communicative level of spontaneous speech. Sentences which are read, represent the 'ideal' use of stres­ses and intonation; pauses come at natural constituents breaks in the sentence. In speech all but the most fluent speakers will have some hesitation markers in spontaneous speech (called fillers, spelt -er) or longer breaks bet­ween two tone groups. Thus characteristic and differentiating features of spontaneous utterances will be the following:

(1) stress marks lexical words as well as non-lexical words;

(2) tone groups no longer mark off the major constituents of the sentence; spontaneous speech in this sense is very much less structured;

(3) the tonic can occur on any stressed syllable even in non-lexical items, which may be the result of rhythm.

 

We shouldn't forget that in speech we deal with such processes as the process of intensification, specification and the like, which demand the redistribution of stresses including a to­nic stress in the utterance.

In speech performance a speaker ignores (do not stress) any information that does not possibly contribute to the co­herent semantic structure which he is trying to compose. Ba­sically, he intends to say something that makes sense. The dif­ficulty in producing any extended utterance is that the spea­ker has to monitor what it is that he has just finished saying while he is producing what he is saying at the moment and planning what he is going to say in his next utterance. Some speakers manage this enormously complicated process with ap­parent ease. This process may be made easier for the speaker if he possesses the ability of moving the tonic off the last lexical item. This intonation device might be regarded as one of the means of making a text or discourse internally cohe­sive. It is like the syntactic, devices of pronominalization and other means of anaphoric reference, used to show the re­lations holding between sentences.

Finally, we shall turn to discussing the pitch direction of a tonic stress. The difficulty lies in the fact that from the mass of phonetic data, we should extract the most regu­lar systematic patterns. We assume that ‘academic speechwhich is primarily concerned with communication of ‘intellec­tual facts within the framework of a coherent structure of discourse, - is the ‘idealized’ tone pattern in comparison with the ’conversational’ speech. The ‘academic speech is characterized by

(a) the final tone group always containing a falling tone;

(b) a non-final tone group either having a non-final falling tonic (falling to mid low) or a rising tonic (rising to mid-high), or falling-rising;

(c) the pre-tonic (the first stressed and any other stresses syllables following before the tonic) being either fair­ly low and level or beginning on a fairly high pitch and stepping down to fairly low before the tonic. Any unstressed syllables preceding the pre-tonic will be on a mid-low pitch.

 

It’s not clear when one can say that the pitch pattern of the tonic syllable contributes in any way to the meaning of the utterance. The most that we can claim for the ‘meaning’ of one tone as against another is that it indicates whether a tonic group is the final tonic group in a sentence or not. The meaning or the message of an utterance is a complex phe­nomenon which underlines the phonetic, lexical-grammatical, semantic and pragmatic realization of a given message. Still, in some respects, a falling tone may be associated with categorical finality, whereas a rising tone - with non-finality, with non-categorical utterances. The details of pragmatic information a certain type of unit can convey will be deal with in practice section.

 

 




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