LECTURES 7. INTONATION

Issues of the lecture:

1) Definition of intonation.

2) Functions of intonation.

3) Components of intonation.

4) Intonation pattern and intonation group.

5) Tones.

6) The tempo and pausation.

7) The problem of the emphasis.

Things to pay special attention:

The definition of sentence intonation differs radically from the one supported by the overwhelming majority of foreign linguists, who reduce it to only one of its components: variations in voice pitch.

According to D.Jones intonation may be defined as variations in the pitch of the musical note produced by the vibration of the vocal cords.

Regarding intonation as quite a different thing from stress, D.Jones has, nevertheless, to admit that there are important relations between intonation and stress in English, as indeed in all ‘stress languages’. The effect of prominence is often produced by certain combinations of the two.

Lilias Armstrong and Ida Ward define intonation as the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice while speaking. They also point out the inseparable connection between intonation and stress. A change in pitch, or intonation, makes a word more prominent, and more to that, sometimes it is difficult to decide whether stress or intonation or the combination of the two is responsible for certain effects.

A.C.Gimson also interprets intonation as variations in pitch, rises and falls in pitch level, emphasizing the fact that various degrees accentuation in an utterance may be signaled by means of intonation.

The American descriptivists do not consider stress as a component of intonation, although they regard both as closely connected with each other,

However, some foreign linguists in their latest works are beginning to define sentence intonation also as something more than just variations of pitch. Thus, L.S.Hultzen in his article ‘Grammatical Intonation’ describes the latter as pattern of accents; an accent is a composite of relative pitch, loudness (= stress in some patterns) and length.

Since those who equate intonation with pitch variations recognize at the same time, openly or implicitly, the latter’s inseparable connection with the other supra-segmental characteristics of the sentence, there may be suggested three ways to understand the notion of intonation:

1. narrow sense: intonation = pitch variations, speech melody;

2. broad sense: intonation = a complex unity of four components (pitch, accent, tempo/ rhythm/ pausation, voice-tamber).

3.adopting a special term – prosodization, or prosodation, as it is a complex of four supra-segmental, or prosodic features.

Intonation

There is confusion about intonation caused by the fact that the word is used with two different meanings: in its more restricted sense, 'intonation' refers to the variations in the pitch of a speaker's voice used to convey or alter meaning, but in its broader and more popular sense it is used to cover much the same field as 'prosody', where variations in such things as voice quality, tempo and loudness are included. It is, regrettably, common to find in pronunciation teaching materials accounts of intonation that describe only pitch movements and levels and then claim that a wide range of emotions and attitudes are signaled by means of these pitch phenomena. There is in fact very little evidence that pitch movements alone are effective in doing signaling of this type. It is certainly possible to analyze pitch movements (or their acoustic counterpart, fundamental frequency) and find regular patterns that can be described and tabulated. Many attempts have been made at establishing descriptive frameworks for stating these regularities. Some analysts look for an underlying basic pitch melody (or for a small number of them) and then describe the factors that cause deviations from these basic melodies; others have tried to break down pitch patterns into small constituent units such as "pitch phonemes" and "pitch morphemes", while the approach most widely used in Britain takes the tone unit as its basic unit and looks at the different pitch possibilities of the various components of the tone unit (the pre-head, head, tonic syllable/nucleus and tail). As mentioned above, intonation is said to convey emotions and attitudes. Other linguistic functions have also been claimed: interesting relationships exist in English between intonation and grammar, for example: in a few extreme cases a perceived difference in grammatical meaning may depend on the pitch movement, as in the following example –

She didn't go because of her ′timetable (meaning "she did go, but it was not because of her timetable")

and

She didn't go because of her \ timetable (meaning "she didn't go, the reason being her timetable").

Other "meanings" of intonation include things like the difference between statement and question, the contrast between "open" and "closed" lists (where 'would you like / wine, / sherry or / beer' is "open", implying that other things are also on offer, while 'would you like / wine, / sherry or \ beer' is "closed", no further choices being available) and the indication of whether a relative clause is restrictive or non-restrictive (as in, for example, 'the car which had bad brakes crashed' compared with 'the car, which had bad brakes, crashed'). Another approach to intonation is to concentrate on its role in conversational discourse: this involves such aspects as indicating whether the particular thing being said constitutes new information or old, the regulation of turn-taking in conversation, the establishment of dominance and the elicitation of cooperative responses. As with the signaling of attitudes, it seems that though analysts concentrate on pitch movements there are many other prosodic factors being used to create these effects. Much less work has been done on the intonation of languages other than English. It seems that all languages have something that can be identified as intonation; there appear to be many differences between languages, but one suspects, on reading the literature, that this is due more to the different descriptive frameworks used by different analysts than to inter-language differences. It is claimed that tone languages also have intonation, which is superimposed upon the tones themselves, and this creates especially difficult problems of analysis.

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Literature:

1) Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П., Кантер Л.А., Крылова Н.И. Практическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб.для студ.высш.уч.заведений. –М.:Гуманит.изд.центр ВЛАДОС, 2003.- с.149-160.

2) Васильев В.А. Фонетика английского языка. Теоретический курс. - М: «Высшая школа», 1969.- С. 289-320.

3) Соколова М.А., Гинтовт К.П., Кантер Л.А., Крылова Н.И. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб.для студ.высш.уч.заведений. –М.:Гуманит.изд.центр ВЛАДОС, 2004.- с.135-184.

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