1- What are the prosodic features of the English language? The prosodic features include Pitch, Loudness,and speed (or Tempo, or Speech rate, It´s inverse is the duration of the constituent segments). Thesecombine together to form the rhythm of speech and they are combined with pausesto break up the flow of speech. Another 2 characteristic of prosody are stress and tone, stress is realized by a combination of loudness, pitch and duration; tone is another prosodic characteristic, but the main difference is found in the pitch of the voice 2- What is Intonation? / How can we define Intonation? Intonation is the melody of speech, it involves how the pitch of the voice rise and falls, how it is used in different variation to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning, the rhythm of speech, and accented, stressed and unstressed syllable functions. 3- What is the role of pitch in defining intonation? What does the term pith refer to? Pitch refers to the frequency that vocal folds have when they vibrate. it is necessary to highlight the level of significance that pitch has because, as speakers, we always change our way of speaking. A very important tasks when analyzing intonation is to percieve the speaker´s pitch and that task is rather difficult. Pitch can be described in terms of high and low, and some people find it difficult to relate what they hear in someone is speaking and trying to adapt those words into a scale of high and low. Some important features of pitch are those which carry some linguistic information. for instance: If someone tries to speak while riding a horse, the involuntary movement will make our speaker to have sudden rises and falls as a result, of course that act of speech can not be linguistically significant. something quite similar will happen if we take two speakers at random, one would certainly have a lower pitch than the other, the difference between the two speakers is not linguistically significant becausetheir habitual pitch level is determined by their physical structure. But an individual speaker does have control over his or her own pitch and can choose whether to speak with a high or low pitch. 4- Why do we say English is an intonation language? English does not has the same prosodic characteristics of than, Mandarin, Zulu, Norwegian or Japanese.English does not use tone lexically, that is to say it is not a tone language (when the tone can determine the meaning of a word and the switch from one tone to another changesthe meaning). But English does use tone for intonation, we can say any english word with any tone and this will not change its meaning and, therefore, it will remain the same. The non-lexical meaning is different, where a fall may indicate definiteness, a rise may indicate incompleteness, and a fall-rise may indicate implications. But these intonational meaning apply equally to any other word, or more usually, to a clause, sentence, or sentence fragment. all in all, English usestone intonationally, but not lexically. 5- describe the form of English intonation.
The forms of intonation are the pitch variation, which it can remain at a constant level or with a pitch changing from one level to another; this behavior is call “tone�. A word can be said with a level tone which is not very frequent, or with moving tones which are more common and they can be said with a failing tone or a rising tone, these are the three simply tones possibilities for the intonation used in pronouncing the one-word utterance. However there are complex tones that are also used. The most frequent are the fall-rise tone where the pitch descends and then rises again. The other complex tone, much less frequently used, is the rise-fall in which the pitch rises and then descends. 6- What are the functions of English intonation? The functions of English tones may express: The fall tone can be used to express finality; if someone make a question and the answer is in fall tone, this will indicate that it is not interested. A: Did you know that my cat is sick? B: Really? The rise tone is used when someone giver the impression that something is implied/understood or an invitation to continue what it is being said A: yes, I think he is dead B: what? A: I'm just kidding. The fall rise tone is used to express limited agreement or response with reservation. For example: A: today is Friday? B: No. The rise fall tone is used to convey rather strong feelings, approval, disapproval or surprise. For example: A: The test was easy don't you think? B: I don't think so Level tone is used in restricted context. it is also in the field of uninteresting/boring conversation. for instance: when someone is reading without paying attention on the emphases or when remarking the important content words, the thing that is being read will sound neutral. 7. Why do we say English intonation is systematic, characteristic, and significant? English intonation is systematic becausewe learn English listening and talking, the key is to repeat and imitate English pronunciation of the segments and use stress correctly.
It is characteristic because,every languagesmakes usage of their own pitch tone (in the caseof English four tones are used: rise, fall, rise-fall, fall rise) and we can it is significant because intonation helps the speaker to express linguist meaning in order to convey a clear message.
8- why does peter roach say discourse functions the linguistic and situational contexts where we apply intonation are discourse function; it involves the attitude, the accents and the grammatical structures used in speaking
LucasSalas, Belen Perea, Carla Ya単ez, Noelia Ogasand Pereyra Yamile