The components of the intonation group.

In English, the intonation patterns are on groups of words.

These groups can be called tone groups. Some books call them tone units, intonation groups, or sense groups.

Tone groups can contain only one word or as many as seven or eight.

/no / I really can't put up with it / good-bye/

Because tone groups are said on a single breath, they are limited in length and average about two seconds, or about five words.

An understanding of tone groups is crucial to understanding the difference between written and spoken language. In written language, the basic unit is the sentence; in spoken language, it is the tone group. We break up spoken language into tone groups because we need to breathe, and so there is a physical reason for this structure. But there is also the need to think; that is, tone groups also have a cognitive basis. While we are speaking one tone group, we are planning the next one, and so the tone group carries only one idea at a time. Thus the pace of the tone groups, and the information they convey, matches the speaker's thoughts.

From time to time, it is necessary to pause and draw breath, and also to plan.

These planning pauses are often marked by um or er, which are technically called voiced hesitations.

Components:

Pre-head - any unstressed syllables occurring before the first stressed syllable, called anacrustic syllables – not part of a rhythm group – produced rapidly, vulnerable to underarticulation and elision of vowels and consonants resulting in phonotactic structures not found elsewhere, e.g. “ It’s raining” pronounced as /tsreɪnɪŋ/, “We’re all going” as /wrɔːl gəʊɪŋ/, "There are plenty" as /drəplentiː/

Head - any rhythm-groups occurring before the onset of the nuclear tone (i.e. before the tonic syllable) – the first stressed syllable in a head is usually more prominent than subsequent ones and is sometimes called the onset stress

Nucleus (tonic syllable)- the syllable on which the nuclear tone begins – the only part that must be in every intonation-group by definition

tail - any syllables or rhythm-groups occurring after the tonic syllable but before the end of the intonation-group – stressed syllables in tails are generally not as perceptually prominent as they are in heads, and are marked with a subscript stress mark,

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