Basic types of prosodic contours in English.

Analysis of English utterances into intonation-groups shows that they are co-extensive with a stretch of speech of various grammatical nature: an independent sentence, a principal or a subordinate clause, two or even more clauses, a group of words or even one word. Co-extensiveness with a sentence is typical of only a small portion of speech material (about 17 %, according to experimental data). An intonation-group corresponding to a grammatical sentence is marked by specific characteristics of tone, stress and duration, serving to express semantic completeness and independence — the relevant features of an utterance. An intonation-group of this kind is defined as a simple tune.

Most grammatical sentences are prosodically expressed by a combination of intonation-groups. These combinations have a specific function of a double nature: on the one hand, they present information in the form of relatively separate semantic items, and on the other hand, they make up a communicative whole (entity) out of these separate parts. Utterances which are composed of more than one intonation-group form a combined tune.

Some sentences lend themselves to be subdivided more readily than others. Long sentences, most naturally, break up into smaller parts in spoken language. Their division is based both on physiological convenience (an intonation-group is normally a breath-group) and on the complexity of information being conveyed, e.g.:

After a long boring wait | I eventually boarded my plane.

Of the two factors - physiological convenience and complexity of information - semantic reasons are overriding in importance. Through intonation division the speaker can make several items stand out as more or less independent parcels of information in a short utterance, too, increasing thereby the general prominence of the utterance,Nobody | could deny it.

Another major characteristic involved is the syntactic structure of an utterance. The number of intonation-groups in utterances of the same length may often vary precisely because of the peculiarities of their syntactic structure, which may either presuppose prosodic division as an obligatory feature or, vice versa, 'forbid' it, or else (as a third and most frequently occurring variant) allow of two options: with or without an intonation boundary between the constituents of a sentence.

Prosodic division is typically optional in expanded simple sentences with adverbial modifiers of different kinds, complex sentences with object, relative or attributive clauses and some others. The grouping of words within a message into longer or shorter sections and the placement of an intonation boundary in such cases is largely a matter of the speaker's semantic interpretation of an utterance, as well as his communicative intention. As a result the same written sentence read aloud by different people may have a different number of intonation-groups. E.g.:Many working mothers do not have time to cook. Many working mothers | do not have time to cook.

She has learned to keep quiet about her personal relationships. She has learned to keep quiet | about her personal relationships.

Often the number of intonation-groups is the same, but the location of their boundaries varies. E.g.:

Los Angeles | is well known | for both the high level of its air pollution | and the efforts made to control it.

Los Angeles is well known | for both the high level of its air pollution | and the efforts | made to control it.

An intonation boundary is obligatory, or, at any rate, highly probable in complex sentences with subordinate clauses of condition, cause, time (in pre-position to the principal clause), concession, result, comparison (particularly, when there is an adverbial modifier of manner in the principal clause) and some others. E.g.:

Since you refuse to help, | I must do it alone.

In spite of the rain and bitter cold | they all came in time.

Strictly speaking, there is no rule forbidding a pause in any place within an utterance (cf. the so-called hesitation pauses), but from the point of view of syntactical predicta­bility certain positions in an utterance display a very small probability of a break. Thus, e.g. the subject of a sentence expressed by a personal pronoun is but seldom separated from the predicate; a preposed attribute is usually closely linked to the noun, etc.

The choice of a number of intonation-groups in an utterance also depends on the type and form of speech. In a dictation, for instance, an utterance is divided up into smaller sections than in any other kind of reading, and spontaneous speech is characterized by uneven length of intonation-groups, and their boundaries are less predictable from the syntactic structure than in reading aloud.

4. Manifestation of phonemes in speech. Phoneme and allophone

Every language has a limited number of sound types which are shared by all the speakers of the language and are linguistically important because they distinguish words in the language. In English there are 20 vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes; in Russian there are 6 vowel and 35 consonant pho­nemes.

All the actual speech sounds are allophones (or variants) of the phonemes that exist in the language. Those that distinguish words, when opposed to one another in the same phonetic position, are realizations of different phonemes-E.g. /v/ and /w/ in English are realizations of two different phonemes because they distinguish such words as "vine" and "wine", "veal" and "wheel" etc.

Those sounds that cannot distinguish words in a definite language and occur only in certain positions or in combination with certain sounds are rea­lizations of one and the same phoneme, its allophones (or variants). In English for example, the "dark" / i I and the "clear" /I/ are variants, or allophones of the same phoneme.

Therefore, the phoneme may be defined as the smallest linguistically relevant unit of the sound structure of a given language which serves to distinguish one word from another.

Allophones (or variants) of a certain phoneme are speech sounds which are realizations of one and the same phoneme and which, therefore, cannot distinguish words. Their articulatory and acoustic distinctions are conditioned by their position and their phonetic environment.

Allophones of a phoneme which never occur in identical positions are said to be in complementary distribution. For example, an RP speaker pro­nounces a "dark" ailophone of /I/ before consonants in final position, whereas he usually pronounces a."clear" ailophone of /I/ only before vowels and /j/. It means that in English both the "dark" and the "clear" allophones of /I/ are in complementary distribution as they are never opposed to each other in iden­tical phonetic positions. In spite of their acoustic and articulatory differen­ces they are not perceived by English speakers as different sounds.

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