Prosody and intonation. Utterance prosody and its linguistic functions. There are two main approaches to the problem of intonation in GB

There are two main approaches to the problem of intonation in GB. One is known as a contour analysis and the other may be called grammatica l. It is widely used. the smallest unit to which linguistic meaning can beattached is a tone-group (sense-group). theory is based on the assumption that intonation consists of basic functional "blocks". Intonation is treated by them as a layer that is superimposed on the lexico-grammatical structure. The grammatical approach to the study of intonation was worked out by Halliday. The main unit of intonation is a clause. Intonation is a complex of three systemic variables: tonality, tonicity and tone, which are connected with gramm. categories. Tonality marks the beginning and the end of a tone-group. Tonicity - the focal point of each tone-group. They convey the attitude of the speaker.It can be primary and secondary. Hallyday's theory is based on the syntactical function of intonation.Crystal distinguishes the following functions of intonation. • Emotional function's. express attitudinal meaning -sarcasm, surprise, reserve, impatience...• Grammatical function identify grammatical structure in speech, similar to punctuation. • Informational function draw attention. The word carrying the most prominent tone in a contour signals the part of an utterance that the speaker is treating as new information.• Textual function helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere. • Psychological function helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize. • Indexical function, is an important marker of personal or social identity. 2. Components of intonation and the structure of English intonation group. In the pitch component we may consider the distinct variations in the direction of pitch, pitch level and pitch range. The most important nuclear tones in English are: L F, H F, L R, H R, and F-R. The meanings of the nucl. tones are difficult to specify. the falling tone expresses certainty, completeness, and independence. A r ising tone - uncertainty, incompleteness or dependence. A falling-rising tone combine the falling tone's meaning of assertion, with the rising tone's meaning of dependence. In English there is often clear evidence of an intonation-group boundary, but no audible nuclear tone movement preceding. Different levels. Low Level tone is very characteristic of reading poetry. Mid-Level tone is particularly common in spontaneous speech functionally replacing the rising tone. There are two more nuclear tones in English: Rise-Fall and Rise-Fall-Rise. But adding refinement to speech they are not absolutely essential tones for the foreign learner to acquire. Rise-Fall can always be replaced by High Fall and Rise-Fall-Rise by Fall-Rise without making nonsense of the utterance.there are nine ways of saying Yes as an answer to the question Will you marry me? 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.Two more pitch parameters are pitch ranges and pitch levels. Three pitch ranges: normal, wide, and narrow. Pitch levels: high, medium, and low. Loudness is used in a variety of ways. 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.Any stretch of speech can be split into smaller portions by means of pauses. We may distinguish the following three kinds of pauses: 1. Short pauses which may be used to separate intonation groups within a phrase. 2. Longer pauses which normally manifest the end of the phrase.3. Very long pauses, which are approximately twice as long as the first type, are used to separate phonetic wholes. Functionally, there may be distinguished syntactic, emphatic and hesitation pauses. Syntactic pauses separate phrases and intonation groups. Emphatic pauses serve to make especially prominent certain parts of the utterance. Hesitation pauses are mainly used in spontaneous speech to gain some time to think over what to say next. They may be silent or filled. FUNCTIONS OF PROSODY

The prosody of the utterance performs a number of functions, the basic of which are constitutive, distinctive and identificatory. 1. The constitutive function is to form utterances as commu­nicative units. Prosody unifies words into utterances, thus giving the latter the final form without which they cannot exist. A succession of words arranged syntactically is not a communicative unit until a certain prosodic pattern is attached to it. E.G. Prosody is the only language device that transform words as vocabulary items into comnunicative units — utterances. In written speech prosodic features are to some extent indicated by punctua­tion marks, e.g. "Fire!" is a command or an exclamation, depending on the situation in which it occurs, "Fire?" — a question, Prosody forms all communicative types of utterances — statements, questions, imperatives, exclamations and modal (attitudinal) types: — e.g. categoric statements, non-categoric, perfunctory statements, quizzical statements, certainty and uncertainty questions, insistent questions, etc. In constituting an utterance, prosody at the same time performs the segmentative and de limitative function. It segments connected discourse into utterances and intonation groups, and simultaneously delimits them one from another, showing relations between them. It also signals the semantic nucleus and other semantically important words of an ut­terance (or an intonation group). Prosody also constitutes phonetic styles of speech 2. The distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in several particular functions, depending on the meaning which is differentiated. These are communicative—distinctive, modal-distinctive, culminative ("theme— rheme") distinctive, syntactical — distinctive and stylistic—distinctive functions.

The communicative —distinctive function is to differen­tiate the communicative types of utterances, i.e. statements, questions, ex­clamations, imperatives, and communicative subtypes: within statements — statesments proper, answers, announcements, etc.; within questions — first instance questions, repeated questions, echo ques­tions; within imperatives — commands, requests and so on.

The modal-distinctive (attitudinal-distinctive) function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating modal meanings of utterances (such as certainty versus uncertainty, definiteness versus indefiniteness) and the speaker's attitudes (for instance, a reserved, dispassionate versus involved, interested attitude, or antagonistic versus friendly attitude and so on). Into this function some phoneticians include differentiation of the speaker's emo­tions, the emotional function.

The culminative — distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating the location of the semantic nucleus of utterances and other semantically important words. This function is often called logical, pre­dicative and accentual.The adherents to the theory of "sentence perspective" claim that in this way prosody indicates the "theme-rheme" organization of an utterance, i.e. it distinguishes between what is already known and what is new in the utte­rance..The syntactical—distinctive function of prosody is to dif­ferentiate syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations in sentences.

Stylistic — distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in that prosody differentiates pronunciation (phonetic) styles, determined by extralinguistic factors. 3. The identificatory function of prosody is to provide a basis for the hearer's identification of the communicative and modal type of an ut­terance, its semantic and syntactical structure with the situation of the discourse.All the functions of prosody are fulfilled simultaneously and cannot be separated one from another. They show that utterance prosody is linguistically significant and meaningful.

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