The tone-unit as the minimal unit of intonation description.

THEORY OF PHONETICS (Philology Department)

Seminar No 4

INTONATION

Points for Study

Intonation as a complex unity of prosodic features.

The main functions of intonation.

The pitch component of intonation.

The tone-unit as the minimal unit of intonation description.

Required literature:

Lecture 5, Seminar 4

1. Паращук В.Ю. Теоретична фонетика англійської мови: Навчальний посібник для студентів факультетів іноземних мов. – Вінниця: НОВА КНИГА, 2005. – pp. 171– 182.

2. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: Учеб. Для студ. ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. / М.А. Соколова, К.П. Гинтовт и др. – М.: ВЛАДОС, 1996. – С. 121–134.

Optional literature:

1. Cruttenden A. Intonation. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. – 216 p.

2. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. – 2^nd ed. – Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003. – P. 236, 250–251.

3. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. – 5^th ed. Revised by Alan Cruttenden. -Bristol: J W Arrowsmith Ltd, 1996. – P. 201–212.

4. Roach P. English Phonetics and Phonology. A practical course. – Cambridge: CUP, 1998. – P. 93–111.

● INTONATION AS A COMPLEX UNITY OF PROSODIC FEATURES

A complex unity of speech melody, sentence-stress, rhythm, tempo, and timbre is called intonation.

Speech melody is the changes in the pitch of the voice in connected speech. The pitch component makes the core of the intonation.

Sentence-stress/utterance-level stress/accent is the greater prominence of one or more words among other words in the sentence (force component).

According to Prof. Vassilyev the temporal component of intonation manifests itself in: 1) pauses; 2) duration (rate or tempo in speech) and 3) rhythm (in close combination with sentence stress).

Speech tempo is the relative speed of utterance which is measured by the rate of syllable succession and the number and duration of pauses in a sentence. The average rate delivery may contain from about two to four syllables per second for slow speech/lento, from about three to six syllables for normal speech, and from about five to nine syllables for fast speech/allegro. Differences of rate are used to help the listener to differentiate the more important /slow rate/ and the less important /fast rate/ parts of the utterance. Rate also performs emotional and attitudinal functions.

Rhythm is a regular recurrence of stressed syllables. In English stressed syllables occur at (approximately) equal periods of time.

● THE MAIN FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION

If you try to imagine speech without intonation in which every syllable was said on the same pitch level, with no pauses and no changes in speed or loudness, it would be a sort of speech produced by a ‘mechanical speech device’ that made sentences by putting together recordings of isolated words. In the broadest possible sense, intonation makes it easier for a listener to understand what the speaker is trying to convey. The ways in which intonation does this are very complex, and there is no agreement among phoneticians about its functions.

Functions as summarized by D. Crystal in ‘The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language’:

1. Emotional. Intonation's most obvious role is to express attitudinal meaning - sarcasm, surprise, reserve, impatience, delight, shock, anger, interest and thousands other semantic nuances.

2. Grammatical. Intonation helps to identify grammatical structure in speech, performing a role similar to punctuation. Units such as clause and sentence often impend on intonation for their spoken identity, and several specific contrasts, such as question/statement make systematic use of it.

3. Informational. Intonation helps draw attention to what meaning is given and what is new in an utterance. The word carrying the most prominent tone in a contour signals the part of an utterance that the speaker is treating as new information: I've got a new pen, I bought three books. I saw a BLUE car.

4. Textual. Intonation helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere. In radio news-reading, paragraphs of information can be shaped through the use of pitch. In sports commentary, changes in prosody reflect the progress of the action.

5. Psychological. Intonation helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize. Most people would find a sequence of ten numbers (4, 7, 3, 8, 2, 6, 4, 8, 1, 5) difficult to recall; the task is made easier by using intonation to chunk the sequence into two units (4, 7, 3, 8, 2 / 6, 4, 8, 1, 5).

6. Indexical. Intonation, along with other prosodic features, is an important marker of personal or social identity. Lawyers, preachers, newscasters, sports commentators, army sergeants, and several other occupations are readily identified through their distinctive prosody.

Functions as summarized by P. Roach in ‘English Phonetics and Phonology’:

a) We express emotions and attitudes as we speak, and this adds a special kind of meaning to spoken language. This is often called the attitudinal function of intonation. Ми виражаємо свої емоції та своє ставлення до того, що ми говоримо. Це функція демонстрації відношення.

E.g.: Fall can express finality, definiteness, etc.; rise is encouraging, etc.; fall-rise is requesting, it expresses uncertainty, doubt, etc.; rise-fall: surprise, being impressed, etc.

b) Intonation helps to mark out stressed syllables and in particular nuclear (tonic) syllable as the most important syllable in the tone-unit. This has been called the accentual function of intonation. Інтонація допомагає виділити наголошені склади та ядерний склад, що є найважливішим у синтагмі. Це акцентуальна функція (акцент = наголос).

E.g.: It was VERy BOR ing. It was VER y BORing.

c) Intonation helps to recognize the boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences, the difference between questions and statements. This has been called the grammatical function of intonation.

E.g.: DID you PARK the CAR / general ←question→special WHERE did you PARK the CAR /

They are COMing on TUES day / ARENT they / tag - questioning

They are COMing on TUES day / ARENT they / tag - confirming

THOSE who SOLD QUICK ly / MADE a PROF it / = A profit was made by those who sold quickly.

THOSE who SOLD / QUICKly MADE a PROF it / = A profit was quickly made by those who sold.

d) Looking at the act of speaking in a broader way, we can see that intonation can signal to a 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. Such functions are examples of intonation’s discourse function.

- each sentence could be studied in isolation and be analysed in terms of grammatical construction, lexical content and so on. But it is obvious that the sentences form part of some larger act of conversational interaction between two speakers; the sentences contain several things that indicate some shared knowledge (e.g. that meeting implies that both speakers know which meeting is being spoken about).

Іntonation can help in focusing attention. The tone chosen can indicate whether the tone-unit in which it occurs is being used to present new information or to refer to information which is felt to be already possessed by speaker and hearer. For example, in the following sentence:

SINCE the LAST time we MET / when we had that HUGE DINNER / ive BEEN on a DIET

The first two tone-units present information which is important to what the speaker is saying, but which is not something new and unknown to the listener. The final tone-unit, however, does present new information. Writers on discourse intonation have proposed that the falling tone indicates new information while rising (including falling-rising) tones indicate ‘shared’ or ‘given’ information.

● SENTENCE/UTTERANCE-LEVEL STRESS AS PROSODIC PROMINENCE/HIGHLIGHTING

In a sentence or an intonation group some words are of greater importance than the others. Words which provide most of the information are called content/notional words. Function/structure/form words are those words which do not carry so much information.

Content words are brought out in speech by means of sentence-stress (or utterance-level stress).

Sentence stress/utterance-level stress is a special prominence given to one or more words according to their relative importance in a sentence/utterance.

Stress, i.e. prosodic highlighting, is related in a very important way to information in all languages, prosodic highlighting serves a very obvious deictic ['daıktık](дейктична, вказівна)function which is to signal important information for the listeners.

The general rule in all languages is that the most important information in a phrase or longer utterance will be highlighted, that is will receive prominence through some kind of accentuation of a particular word or group of words. This accentuation may involve a noticeable:

1) change in a pitch - usually, but not always, a pitch rise;

2) increase in duration, or length of a syllable;

3) increase in loudness; or

4) combinations of l-3.

Under normal, or unmarked, conditions, it is the content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) that are accentuated by pitch, length, loudness or a combination of these prosodic features. Function words (prepositions, articles, pronouns) and affixes (suffixes and prefixes) are de-emphasized or backgrounded informationally by destressing them. When any word receiving stress has more than one syllable, it is only the word's most strongly stressed syllable that carries the sentence stress.

In ordinary, rapid speech such words can occur much more frequently in their weak form than in their strong form. Because they are unstressed in the stream of speech, function words exhibit various forms of reduction, including the following:

1) the weakening or centralizing of the internal vowel to schwa,e.g. must /məst/. In certain phonetic environments, e.g. where syllabic consonants are possible, the reduction of a short vowel + consonant sequence to a syllabic consonant /ænd/ > /n/, as in the example of bread and butter, fish and chips, etc. Sometimes the unstressed internal vowel can fall out completely, e.g. from /frəm/ > /frm/,/fm/

2) loss of an initial consonant sound, e.g. them /ðəm/ - /əm/, his /hız/ > /ız/;

3) loss of a final consonant, e.g. and /ənd/ >/ən/.

In fact, function words cause problems for the nonnative listeners since in their most highly reduced form, the pronunciation forms for many common function words are virtually identical, e.g. a, have, of > /ə/.

The main function of sentence stress is to single out the focus/the communicative centre of the sentence which introduces new information.

Sentence Focus. Within a sentence/an intonation unit, there may be several words receiving sentence stress but only one main idea or prominent element. Speakers choose what information they want to highlight in an utterance/sentence. The stressed word in a given sentence which the speaker wishes to highlight receives prominence and is referred to as the (information) focus/the semantic center.

In unmarked utterances, it is the stressed syllable in the last content word that tends to exhibit prominence and is the focus.

When a conversation begins, the focus /the semantic center is usually on the last content word, e.g. Give me a HELP. What's the MATTER? What are you DOING?

Words in a sentence can express new information (i.e. something mentioned for the first time/rheme/comment) or old information (i.e. something mentioned or referred to before/theme/topic). Within an intonation unit/sentence, words expressing old or given information (i.e. semantically predictable information) are unstressed and are spoken with lower pitch, whereas words expressing new information are spoken with strong stress and higher pitch. Here is an example of how prominence marks new versus old information. Capital letters signal new information (strong stress and high pitch):

A I've lost my HAT. (basic stress pattern: the last content word receives prominence)

B What KIND of hat! {'hat' is now old information; 'kind' is new information)

A It was a SUN hat.

B What COLOR sun hat?

A It was YELlow. Yellow with STRIPES.

B There was a yellow hat with stripes in the CAR.

A WHICH car?

The speaker can give focus/prominence(strong stress and high pitch) to words to contrast information, i.e. to correct or check it. Words which are given prominence to contrast information have contrastive stress, e.g.

1 A Have they ever visited LONdon?

B No, THEY haven't, but their SON has. (correcting information)

2 A I didn 't LIKE the movie.

B You didn't LIKE? (checking information)

The speaker can wish to place special emphasis on a particular element- emphatic stress. The element receiving emphatic stress usually communicates new information within the sentence. It is differentiated from normal focus/prominence by the greater degree of emphasis placed on it by the speaker, e.g.

A How do you like the new courses you've taken this semester?

B I'm REALLY enjoying them! (emphatic stress on really indicates a strong degree of enjoyment)

A I'm NEVER eating oysters again! (emphatic stress placed on never signals a particularly bad reaction the speaker once had when eating oysters)

English has certain anaphoric words whose function is to refer to what has previously (and recently) been communicated in a different way. Since anaphoric words contain no new information - in fact, are intended to repeat old information - they are typically not accented.

A summarized list of anaphoric words can be given as follows:

1. The pronouns he, she, it, and they, which replace definite nouns and noun phrases,

e.g. Everybody likes Archibald. - Everybody likes him. I was sitting behind Lisa. - / was sitting behind her. We waited for our friends. - We waited for them.

2. The pronouns one and some, which replace indefinite noun phrases,

e.g. I'll lend you some money. - I'll lend you some. She ordered a cake. - She ordered one.

3. The pronoun one, ones, which replaces nouns after certain modifiers,

e.g. Are you wearing your brown suit /or the blue one? Is she wearing her brown shoes /or the black ones?

4. The words so and not, which replace clauses after certain verbs and adjectives,

e.g. Has she failed to do it? - 1 hope not, but I'm afraid so.

5. The adverbs there and then, which replace place phrases and time phrases, respectively,

e.g. Have you ever been to Maplewood? I used to live there. Next Monday's a holiday. I think I'll rest then.

6. The auxiliary do, which replaces a whole verb phrase,

e.g. Who made all this mess. -1 did.

When an anaphoric word is accented, the accent signals contrast or something special,

e.g. Do you know Mary and John? I know her.

In addition to the cases listed above, we can recall old information by using words, which in a different context, would present new information. Such lexical items are de-accented, and the de-accenting tells us that the lexical items are being used anaphorically. There are several kinds of lexical anaphora:

1. Repetition, e.g. I've got a job, /but I don't like the job. How many times? Three times.

2. Synonyms, e.g. Maybe this man can give us directions. I'll ask the fellow. (the fellow = the man)

3. Superordinate terms, e.g. Did you enjoy Blue Highways? I haven't read the book

(Blue Highways = the book). This wrench is no good. I need a bigger tool, (wrench = tool)

The purpose of de-accenting in this case is to relate the more general term - the book and tool, in these examples, to the more specific term of the preceding sentence. But the de-accented word or term does not necessarily refer directly to a previous term, e.g. That's a nice looking cake. Have apiece. But it must be de-accented.

De-accenting also occurs when a word is repeated, even though it has a different referent the second time, e.g. a room with a view and without a view, deeds and misdeeds, written and unwritten.

De-accenting can be used for a very subtle form of communication - to embed an additional meaning, e.g. What did you say to Roger? I didn't speak to the idiot. The last sentence actually conveys two meanings, one embedded in the other: 7 didn't speak to Roger', and 'I call Roger an idiot'. De-accenting the idiot is equivalent to saying: the referent for this phrase is the same as the last noun that fits.

In sum, sentence stress/utterance-level stress helps the speaker emphasize the most significant information in his or her message.

● THE PITCH COMPONENT OF INTONATION

The PITCH COMPONENT or SPEECH MELODY can be defined as the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place when voiced sounds, especially vowels and sonorants, are pronounced in connected speech. The pitch parameters consist of the distinct VARIATIONS in:

1. The pitch direction (напрям мелодики).

2. The pitch level (мелодійний рівень) and

3. The pitch range (мелодійний діапазон).

1. direction of the pitch: Not all stressed syllables are of equal importance. One of the syllables has a greater prominence than the others and forms the nucleus or focal point of an intonation pattern. The nucleus marks a significant change of the PITCH DIRECTION, i.e. where the pitch goes distinctly up or down. The inventory of nuclear tones ranges among different phoneticians (4-12). The core: the Low Fall, the Low Rise, the High Fall, the High Rise, the Fall-Rise, the Rise-Fall and the Mid-Level.

R. Kingdondistinguishes STATIC AND KINETIC [kı 'netık] TONES:

Tones are divided into two classes since they may be produced in two quite distinct ways: 1) by keeping the vocal cords at a constant tension thus producing a tone of unvarying pitch; 2) by varying the tension of the vocal cords thus producing a tone of varying pitch. Tones of the first type are known as static (level tones: the High Level, the Low Level ), while those of the second type are known as kinetic or dynamic/moving (high wide fall, mid wide rise, fall-rise, etc.).

Moreover the pitch can change either in one direction only (a SIMPLE TONE) and in more than one direction (a COMPLEX TONE).

1. Declaratives

Falling tones are the least attitudinally marked, high fall expresses more liveliness and involvement than the low fall, cf. It's a very nice `garden. Of `course it is. It's a very dull book. The parcel arrived on Thursday.

Fall-rise is common with a variety of meanings, esp. reservation, contradiction, contrast, warning, as in: I like his wife /even if I don't like him. (It's the twenty fifth today, isn't it?) Twenty sixth. John didn't succeed/but Phil ip did. John'll be very cross / if you don't do it.

High rises in echoes (as already mentioned at the end of the previous section) and on declarative questions: (I did it in blue.) You did it in blue? So you didn't go?

The low rise with only other low syllables before it (i.e. with no preceding pitch accent) is complaining: You mustn't go a way. High pitch before it is encouraging or even patronizing (common in speech to children): You'll 'only over do things. There's 'no point in rush ing.

The least common is the rise-fall. An element of being very impressed or, conversely, being very unim­pressed, and hence indignant or even sarcastic: He's the head of a big firm in Lon don. Oh in deed / How nice for you. Often used for gossip: Have you heard? / Jill's preg nant.

Tone-units: subjects, adverbials, the first clause of compound sentences, and often the subordinate clause of complex sentences – the tones used are usually from the rising group: fall-rise, low rise, and mid-level. Fall-rise carries its meaning of contrast. The difference between the other LR and ML has to do with style: low rise is the more oratorical, typical of reading aloud, the mid-level – just non-finality, occurs only in non-final position: What I'd like (HFR)/is a drink of tea. The best (HFR) person to do it/would be Bill Bailey The cru cial(HFR) issue /is that... We took the car (HFR)/and drove to Birmingham On my way to >work/it started to rain Un>fortunately/it doesn't work like that (cf. Un for tunately(HFR)/it doesn't work like that.

Adverbials. with a separate tone-unit will take a rising tone, if a reinforcing kind – more commonly take a falling tone (e.g. literally, certainly, honestly, by the way, of course, besides): Be`sides/he's had more time than he should have. By the `way/what do you think of the new chap? If adverbials occur following the main clause almost always low rise (but the falling type again takes a fall): I went to Canada/last year (LR). It didn't work/un for tunately(LR). He turned bright red/`literally.

Final subordinate clauses. 2 sequences of tones possible. If the previous main clause has a fall, then the subordinate clause will take a low rise. Alternatively the main clause may take a fall-rise and the subordinate clause the fall, cf. I began to feel `ill / because I hadn't had enough to eat (LR) I began to feel ill (HFR)/ because I hadn't had enough to `eat.

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