Peculiarities of GA intonation.
The most frequent intonation contour for statements and requests in GA is the tune, beginning low, rising to a high level, and then steadily falling. E.g. He asked me to do it. He asked me to do it.
The same type of falling intonation contour may characterize the so called General Questions in GA. Did he ask you to do it?
"Rising" tunes that rise from a low pitch level and end on a high pitch level occur with some General Questions, especially in situations where a very polite form is desirable. E.g. Do you know him?
Though the so—called Special Questions are pronounced with a falling tone in both RP and GA, the difference lies in the pronunciation of the Scale. If in RP it is usually the Descending Scale, in GA the whole utterance is generally pronounced on a level tone. E.g. RP Why haven't you told me about it?
GA Why haven't you told me about it ?
Such questions sound dispassionate and disrespectful to an RP speaker.
The RP Special Questions pronounced with a rising tone (polite questions) are perceived by the Americans as questions implying curiosity.
Another frequent intonational characteristic in GA is to end a sentence with a high—pitched fall—rise.
E.g. Can you do it? We certainly can.
On account of the fact that the features which distinguish AE from British English are so numerous, some linguists claim that AE can no more be considered a variant of the English language.
But most of the linguists express the opposite point of view. It has been proved that the distinctions between AE and BE do not affect the inventory of the main language units. Those distinctions are but functional variations of language units which are common to both variants of the English language: AE and BE.
Thus, there is a wide range of pronunciation varieties of the English language. These varieties reflect the social class the speaker belongs to, the geographical region he comes from, and they also convey stylistic connotations of speech. Some of these varieties are received pronunciations, others are not.
Every national variant of the English language has an orthoepic norm of its own: RP, or Southern English, for British English, GA for American English, the Australian Standard Pronunciation for Australian English. Each of these orthoepic norms tolerates a definite range of phonemic variation, and each of them has its own peculiarities of combinatory phenomena.
Speech prosody. Its perceptible qualities and acoustic properties.
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MEANINGS OF PROSODY
The functions and meanings of prosody should be described with reference to the utterance as the basic communicative unit. The prosody of an utterance (intonation) carries independent meanings of its own, regardless of the words and the grammatical structure of the utterance.
The prosody of the utterance is polysemantic. Due to its structural complexity it can express a number of different meanings of interrogation, non-finality, uncertainty, non—categoric attitude, surprise, etc. The inherent meanings of prosody which are of a general character (such as definiteness — uncertainty, assertiveness — reservations, separateness — connectedness, etc.) are specified and concretized when interacting with the grammatical and lexical meanings of the utterance. There may be cases of correlation and harmony between the inherent meanings of prosody and the meanings of words and grammatical structures as well as disbalance and disharmony. For example, "lt may be/So" (But I'm not quite sure). The falling—rising tone is in harmony with the modal verb. Whereas in "It may be so" (I'm absolutely sure about it) the falling tone makes the statement sound categoric. Or agajn, the meanings of the prosodic structures in the utterances "I like that" and "Clever 'aren't you?" with the challenging or antagonistic Rise—Fall are opposite to the meaning of the words. Intonation gives greater precision and point to the meaning. It provides important information which is not contained in any of the other features of utterance. Hence the role of utterance prosody in communication.
.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. "Pete has left for Leningrad" is not a communicative unit until it is pronounced , i.e. until it acquires a certain pitch—and— stress pattern. 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, "Fire". - a. statement.
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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.
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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.
16. The syllable as a prosodic unit. Word stress, its nature and functions.
The syllable is widely recognized to be the smallest prosodic unit. It has no meaning of its own, but it is significant for constituting hierarchically higher prosodic units. Prosodic features of the syllable (tone, stress, duration) depend on its position and function in the rhythmic unit and in the utterance.
A rhythmic, or accentual, unit (or group) is either one stressed syllable or a stressed syllable with a number of unstressed ones grouped around it.
The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic unit. There are as many rhythmic units in an utterance as there are stressed syllables in it. The unstressed syllables are clitics. Those preceding the stressed syllable are called proclitics, and those following it — enclitics.
The intonation group is hierarchically higher than the rhythmic unit. It has also been termed "syntagm", "sense-group", "tune". The term "intonation group" [110] better reflects the essence of this unit. It shows that the intonation group is the result of the division in which not only stresses, but pitch and duration (i.e. intonation in the broad sense) play a role.
So, a syllable can be defined as a phonetic unit, which is pronounced by one articulatory effort, by one muscular contraction, which results auditorily in one uninterrupted arc of loudness.
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