The nuclear tones and their meanings.

According to D. Crystal

1. Low fall. The most neutral tone; a detached, unemotional statement of fact.

2. Full fall. Emotionally involved; the higher the onset of the tone, the more involved the speaker; choice of emotion (surprise, excitement, irritation) depends on the speaker's facial expression.

3. Mid fall. Routine, uncommitted comment; detached and unexcited.

4. Low rise. Facial expression important; with a 'happy' face, the tone is sympathetic and friendly; with a 'grim' face, it is guarded and ominous.

5. Full rise. Emotionally involved, often «disbelief or shock, the extent of the emotion depending on the width of the tone.

6. High rise. Mild query or puzzlement; often used in echoing what has just been said.

7. Level. Bored, sarcastic, ironic.

8. Fall-rise. A strongly emotional tone; a straight or 'negative' face conveys uncertainty, doubt, or tentativeness; a positive face conveys encouragement or urgency.

9. Rise-fall. Strong emotional involvement; depending on the face, the attitude might be delighted, challenging, or complacent.

The tempo of speech is the third component of intonation. The term tempo implies the rate of the utterance and pausation. The rate of speech can be normal, slow and fast. The parts of the utterance which are particularly important sound slower. Unimportant parts are commonly pronounced at a greater speed than normal.

Rhythm.

Rhythm is the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syl­lables. It^is' so'typical of an English phrase that the incorrect rhythm betrays the non-English origin of the speaker even in cases of "cor­rect" pronunciation.

The'phenomenon of rhythm is closely connected with the phonetic nature of stress.

The units of the rhythmical structure of an utterance are stress groups от rhythmic groups. The perception of boundaries between rhythmic groups is associated with the stressed syllables or peaks of prominence.

Unstressed syllables have a tendency to cling to the preceding stressed syllables — enclitics, or to the following stressed syllables — proclitics. In English, as a rule, initial unstressed syllables cling to the following stressed syllables, non-initial unstressed syllables are enclitics:

Each sense-group of the sentence is pronounced at approximately the same period of time, unstressed syllables are pronounced more

rapidly: the greater the number of unstressed syllables, the quicker they are pronounced. Proclitics are pronounced faster than enclitics. Rhythm is connected with sentence stress. Under the influence of rhythm words which are normally pronounced with two equally strong stresses may lose one of them, or may have their word stress realized differently, e. g.

'Picca'dilly—-'Piccadilly 'Circus—'close to Picca'dilly

In linguistics, rhythm or isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, along with stress and intonation. Languages can be categorized according to whether they are syllable-timed or stress-timed. Speakers of syllable-timed languages such as Spanish and Cantonese put roughly equal time on each syllable; in contrast, speakers of stressed-timed languages such as English and Mandarin Chinese put roughly equal time lags between stressed syllables, with the timing of the unstressed syllables in between them being adjusted to accommodate the stress timing.

Narmour[32] describes three categories of prosodic rules which create rhythmic successions which are additive (same duration repeated), cumulative (short-long), or countercumulative (long-short). Cumulation is associated with closure or relaxation, countercumulation with openness or tension, while additive rhythms are open-ended and repetitive. Richard Middleton[33] points out this method cannot account for syncopation and suggests the concept of transformation.

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