WORK N°1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1) What are the prosodic features of the English language? The features of PITCH, LENGTH and LOUDNESS are called SUPRASEGMENTAL or PROSODIC when they are used to produce patterns that extend over larger chunks of utterance than the single segment. Pitch is used to make differences of tone (a feature of syllables or words) and Intonation (a feature of phrases or clauses). Some combination of the features of pitch, length and loudness will also produce Accent where some syllables stand out from those around them. Other prosodic features include Rhythm (regular “beat” in speech); Tempo (the speed or rhythm); and Voice Quality which sometimes conveys meaning.
2) What is intonation? INTONATION is the melody of speech, which involves the analysis of pitch variation, the study of the rhythm of speech and how they interplay of accented, stressed and unstressed syllables function as a framework onto which the intonation patterns are attached. 3) What is the role of pitch in defining intonation? What does the term “pitch” refer to? PITCH refers to an auditory sensation which places sounds on a scale from “low” to “high”. It is the level of the voice. It can be compared with notes played on a musical instrument. Pitch is used in many languages as an essential component of the pronunciation of the word, so that a change of pitch makes cause a change in meaning: these are called TONE LANGUAGES. In most languages, pitch plays a central role in intonation. For pitch differences to be linguistically significant, it is a necessary condition that they should be under the speaker´s control. There is another necessary condition and that is that a pitch difference must be “perceptible”; it is possible to detect differences in the frequency of the vibration of the speaker’s voice. Finally, it should be remembered that in looking for linguistically significant aspects of speech we must always be looking for “contrast”. 4) What do we say English is an intonational language? We can say any English word with any of the intonational “tones”, but the choice of tone that not alter the lexical identity of the word. The lexical meaning is still the same. The non- lexical meaning is different, where we see that a fall may indicate the definiteness, a rise may indicate incompleteness, and a fall-rise may indicate implications. But these intonational meanings apply equally to any word or, more usually to a clause, or sentence. Thus English makes use of tone intonationally but not lexically. Many of the world´s languages are tone languages, in which substituting one distinctive tone for another on a particular word or morpheme can cause a change in the meaning of that word or morpheme, or in some aspect of its grammatical categorization. Although tones or pitch differences are used for other purposes, English is one of the languages that do not use tone in this way. Languages such as English are sometimes called intonational language. In tone languages the main suprasegmental contrastive unit is the tone, which is usually linked to the phonological unit that we call the syllable.
5) Describe the form of English intonation. TONE UNITS: the boundaries between intonational phrases may be indicated by a combination of internal and external factors. Among the external ones is pause. Boundaries are indicated by //. Example: when I woke up// I didn´t even realize// what time it was. PROMINENCE: the pronunciation of simple words and of longer intonational phrases are both described in terms of obligatory PRIMARY ACCENT and an optional SECONDARY ACCENT. It is stated that the final pitch accent in a word or intonational phrase is usually the most prominent, while the pitch accent on an earlier syllable is referred to as a secondary accent. Example: Is Peter birthday the thirty-first? It is the TWENTY- first. Did you say Peter´s birthday was the twenty-fourth? It is the twenty-FIRST. TONES: Falling tone: a falling glide may start from the highest pitch of the speaking voice and fall to the lowest pitch, marked
’ (a high fall); or from a mid pitch to the lowest pitch, marked ‚ (a low fall).
Rising tone: rising glide may extent from low to mid, or from low or mid to high. Falling rising tome: the fall and rise may be confined within one syllable, the glide beginning at about mid level and ending at the same level.
6) What are the functions of English intonation? ATTITUDINAL: intonation is used to express emotions and attitudes adding special meaning to the spoken language because a sentence can be said in different ways. The tone is an important factor. Fall → finality. Rise → general questions, grammatical, listing, “more to follow”, encouraging. Fall -rise → uncertainty, doubt, requesting. Rise- fall → surprise, being impressed. ACCENTUAL: intonation helps to produce the effect of prominence on syllables that need to be perceived as stress, 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 the tone unit. In this case, intonation works to focus attention on a particular lexical item or syllable. This has been called the !accentual function of intonation”. Example: A: what color is your car?
“Blue” is non-prominent in the second speech unit
B: It is BLUE// DARK blue//.
because it repeats information given in the first.
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; for example, such things as the placement of boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences, the difference between questions and statements, and the use of grammatical subordination may be indicated. Thus has been called “grammatical function” of intonation. Example: //we stuck a picture //of an elephant// → is more likely than: //we stuck a // picture of an elephant// or: //we stuck a picture of //an elephant//.
DISCOURSE: we can see that intonation can be 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. Such functions are examples of intonation´s discourse function. 7) Why do we say English intonation is systematic, characteristic and significant? We say English intonation is Systematic because it is organized in the following way: - The Tone Unit: the basic building block of speech is the “tone unit”. - Prominent syllables: each tone unit of ordinary speech has either one or two prominent syllables. - Tone: the last prominent syllable in each tone unit is also a “tonic syllable”. The tonic syllable is the place at which a significant pitch movement or tone begins. There are five tones: the falling, the rising, rise-fall, fall-rise and level. - Key: the pitch level of the first prominent syllable establishes the “key” of the tone unit. It may be “high”, “mid” or “low”. We also say that English intonation is Characteristic because languages differ in the intonation patterns they use. The same pattern may have different meanings in different languages. A low- rise tone pattern in English has implications of non-finality or perhaps uncertainty or truculence while in other languages may signal a simple statement. An accent on a pronoun may have a neutral meaning in some languages but in English, it highlights the pronoun to suggest a contrast between its referent and some other person involved. The real importance in describing intonation features lies in the way they affect meaning. Intonation is not a “tune” imposed upon speech: its use contributes to how speech carries a message. That is way we say the English intonation is Significant.
Students: - Gordillo Eugenia
-Rodriguez David
- Maubecin Maira
- Villalba Constanza.
- Montoya Liliana