The components (subsystems) of utterance prosody and units of its analysis

I. PITCH (=speech melody) is present in every word and in the whole sentence, because it serves to delimit sentences into sense groups, or intonation groups.

1) PITCH LEVEL of the whole utterance is determined by the pitch of its highest-pitched syllable. It shows the degree of semantic importance the speaker attaches to the utterance and also the speaker's attitude and emotions.

2) PITCH RANGE of the utterance is the interval between its highest pitched syllable and its lowest pitched one. According to circumstances the speaker may widen or narrow the pitch range to express emphasis or the speaker's attitudes and emotions.

3) RATE OF PITCH VARIATIONS may be different dependant on the time, during which these variations take place, and on the range of the variations. When the rate of the fall is fast, the falling tone sounds more categoric and definite than when the rate of the fall is slow.

4) TONE can be static and kinetic, can have different pitch levels (low, mid, high)

5) DIRECTION OF PITCH MOVEMENT - kinetic tones can be simple/unidirectional (\, /) and complex/bidirectional (\/, /\, /\/).

II. Rhythm. An essential feature of connected speech is that the peaks of prominence (the stressed syllables) are inseparably connected with non-prominent syllables (the unstressed ones). The latter are attached to the stressed syllables, they never exist by themselves. The notion of rhythm implies a certain periodicity of phonological events. Such a periodicity is a peculiarity of English. English speech is rhythmic => the units of the rhythmic organization of an utterance are stress-groups, which may be as well called rhythmic groups.

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