Normal Wide Narrow (of low, medium and high levels)

The pitch range of a whole intonation unit is in fact the inter­val between the highest-pitched and the lowest-pitched syllables. Pitch levels may be high, medium and low.

High__________________________________________________________________________

Medium_______________________________________________________________________

Low___________________________________________________________________________

The meaning of the intonation group is the combination of the "meaning" of the terminal tone and the pre-nuclear part com­bined with the "meaning" of pitch range and pitch level.

The parts of the intonation pattern can be combined in vari­ous ways manifesting changes in meaning, cf.: the High Head combined with the Low Fall, the High Fall, the Low Rise, the High Rise, the Fall-Rise in the phrase "Not at all!"

^→Not atˎall. (reserved, calm)

^→Not at,all.

(encouraging,

friendly)

^→Not atˋall. (surprised, concerned)

^→Not at'all. (questioning)

^→Not at _vall.

(intensely encouraging, protesting)

It should be noted that the more the height of the pitch con­trasts within the intonation pattern the more emphatic the into­nation group sounds, cf.:

He's won.         Fanˎtastic.

^-Fanˎtastic.

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The number of possible combinations is more than a hundred but not all of them ate equally important. Some of them do not differ much in meaning, others are very rarely used. That is why in teaching it is necessary to deal only with a very limited number of intonation patterns, which are the result of a careful choice.

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, e.g.:

"My mother thinks him to be a common labouring boy," said Betty with a sad smile.

The word combination "...a common labouring boy" express­es the main idea of the phrase and is the slowest part of the ut­terance; "My mother thinks him to be" is pronounced at normal speed; the author's words "said Betty with a sad smile" are pro­nounced very quickly to underline their secondary importance for the utterance.

Any stretch of speech can be split into smaller portions, i.e. phonetic wholes', phrases, intonation groups by means of paus­es. By "pause" here we mean a complete stop of phonation. For teaching expediency it is sufficient to 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 phonopassages, phrases, intona­tion groups.

Emphatic pauses serve to make especially prominent certain parts of the utterance, e.g.

¹ By “phonetic whole” here we mean a chain of oral speech which is semantically and intonationally complete. A phonetic whole may be equal to a phrase or include several phrases.

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She is the most ⌇ charming girl I've ever seen.

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, e.g.

She is rather a ... good student.

— Where does she live? — Urn, not very far from here.

It is well to point out here that our ear can also perceive a pause when there is no stop of phonation at all. It may happen because a stop of phonation is not the only factor indicating an intonation unit boundary. The first and the main factor is a per­ceivable pitch change, either stepping down or stepping up, de­pending on the direction of nuclear tone movement. The other criterion is the presence of junctural features at the end of each intonation group. This usually takes the form of a pause but there are frequently accompanying segmental phonetic modifica­tions (variations in tempo, aspiration etc.) which reinforce this. So the intonation unit boundary is not necessarily indicated by a complete stop of phonation.

The changes of pitch, loudness and tempo are not haphazard variations. The rules of change are highly organized. No matter how variable the individual variations of these prosodic compo­nents are they tend to become formalized or standardized, so that all speakers of the language use them in similar ways under similar circumstances. These abstracted characteristics of intona­tion structures may be called intonation patterns which form the prosodic system of English.

Some intonation patterns may be completely colourless in meaning: they give to the listener no implication of the speaker's attitude or feeling. They serve a mechanical function — they provide a mold into which all sentences may be poured so that they achieve utterance. Such intonation patterns represent the intonational minimum of speech and are very helpful for begin­ners in language learning.

 

NOTATION

 

What is the best suitable way of representing intonation in the text?

There are a variety of methods for recording intonation pat­terns in writing and we can look at the advantages and disad­

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vantages of some of the commoner ones. The first three methods reflect variations in pitch only:

1. The method introduced by Ch. Fries (56) involves drawing a line around the sentence to show relative pitch heights:

He's gone to the ⌈o̅f⌉fice.

2. According to the second method the syllables are written at different heights across the page. The method is particularly favoured by D.Bolinger (47), for example:

I ^absoluteIy de^ny it.

Bolinger's book of reading has the cover title:

           a

ton   t

                 i

In                 o

                        n

This method is quite inconvenient as its application wants a special model of print.

3. According to the third, "levels" method, a number of dis­crete levels of pitch are recognized, and the utterance is marked accordingly. This method was favoured by some American lin­guists such as K. Pike (71) and others who recognized four levels of pitch, low, normal, high and extra-high, numbering them from 1—4. Since most linguists who have adopted this method have favoured low-to-high numbering, we shall use this in our exam­ple:

      ₂

He's gone to the ³o¹ffice.

This notation corresponds to the pattern of the example illus­trating the first method.

4. The fourth method is favoured by most of the British phoneticians such as D.Jones, R.Kingdon, J.D.O'Connor and G.F.Amold, M.Halliday, D.Crystal and others, as well as by So­viet phoneticians who have successfully developed and im­proved it. This method has a number of advantages. Firstly, not only variations of pitch but also stressed syllables are marked. Secondly, distinct modifications of pitch in the nuclear syllable are indicated by special symbols, i.e. by a downward and an up-

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ward arrow or a slantwise stress mark. More than that. Pitch movements in the pre-nuclear part can be indicated too. Thirdly, it is very convenient for marking intonation in texts.

One of the disadvantages of this method is that there has been no general agreement about the number of terminal tones and pre-nuclear parts English intonation system requires in order to provide an adequate description. So the simplest (D. Jones) recognizes only two tones, a fall and a rise — easy to distin­guish, but not sufficient for the phonological analysis. We should definitely give preference to a more complex system, such as J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold's, which has no fewer than ten different nuclear tones. It is quite sufficient for teaching pronunci­ation even to high-levelled learners. The most detailed indication of the pre-nuclear part of the intonation pattern is introduced in the textbook "Практическая фонетика английского языка" (28) in which J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold's system has under­gone further modification. All the relevant pitch changes in the pre-nuclear part are indicated by arrows placed before the first stressed syllable instead of an ordinary stress-mark, cf.:

That 'isn't as 'simple as                That ^→isn't as 'simple as it ˋsounds.

it ˋsounds.                                   That ^↘isn't as 'simple as it ˋsounds.

That _↗isn't as 'simple as it ˋsounds.

We believe it is clear from the above that this system de­serves recognition not only because it reflects all relevant varia­tions of the two prosodic components of intonation but also be­cause it serves a powerful visual aid for teaching pronunciation.

Our further point will be the description of intonation in the functional level. The problem that has long ago been with us be­comes more pressing — how to capture in a meaningful and use­ful summary, just what intonation contributes. How can teachers and learners get a working grasp of its significance? And, finally, what is a typical use of intonation in a language like English?

Intonation is a powerful means of human intercommunica­tion. So we shall consider the communicative function the main function of intonation. One of the aims of communication is the exchange of information between people. The meaning of an

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English utterance, i.e. the information it conveys to a listener, derives not only from the grammatical structure, the lexical com­position and the sound pattern. It also derives from variations of intonation, i.e. of its prosodic parameters.

The communicative function of intonation is realized in vari­ous ways which can be grouped under five general headings. In­tonation serves:

1. To structure the information content of a textual unit so as to show which information is new or cannot be taken for granted, as against information which the listener is assumed to possess or to be able to acquire from the context, that is given information.

2. To determine the speech function of a phrase, i.e. to indi­cate whether it is intended as a statement, question, command, etc.

3. To convey connotational meanings of "attitude" such as surprise, annoyance, enthusiasm, involvement, etc. This can in­clude whether meaning are intended, over and above the mean­ings conveyed by the lexical items and the grammatical struc­ture. For example, the sentence: 'Thanks for helping me last night" can be given more than one meaning. The difference be­tween a sincere intention and a sarcastic one would be conveyed by the intonation. Note that in the written form, we are given only the lexics and the grammar. The written medium has very limited resources for marking intonation, and the meanings con­veyed by it have to be shown, if at all, in other ways.

4. To structure a text. As you know, we hope, intonation is an organizing mechanism. On the one hand, it delimitates texts into smaller units, i.e. phonetic passages, phrases and intonation groups, on the other hand, it integrates these smaller constitu­ents forming a complete text.

5. To differentiate the meaning of textual units (i.e. intona­tion groups, phrases and sometimes phonetic passages) of the same grammatical structure and the same lexical composition, which is the distinctive or phonological function of intonation.

6. To characterize a particular style or variety of oral speech which may be called the stylistic function.

There is no general agreement about either the number or the headings of the functions of intonation which can be illus­trated by the difference in the approach to the subject by some

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prominent Soviet phoneticians. T. M. Nikolajeva names the three functions of intonation: delimitating, integrating and semantic functions (24). L. K. Tseplitis suggests the semantic, syntactic and stylistic functions the former being the primary and the two lat­ter being the secondary functions (35); N. V. Cheremisina singles out the following main functions of intonation: communicative, distinctive (or phonological), delimitating, expressive, appella­tive, aesthetic, integrating (36). Other Soviet and foreign phone­ticians also display some difference in heading the linguistic functions of intonation.

Summarizing we may say that intonation is a powerful means of communication process. It follows from this that it is definitely not possible to divorce any function of intonation from that of communication. No matter how many functions are named, all of them may be summed up under a more general heading, that is the function of communication. It should be pointed out here that the structuring functions of intonation mentioned above (delimitating and integrating functions) should be viewed alongside with other functions serving the purpose of communication.

The descriptions of intonation show that phonological facts of intonation system are much more open to question than in the field of segmental phonology. Descriptions differ according to the kind of meaning they regard intonation is carrying and also according to the significance they attach to different parts of the tone-unit. J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold assert that a major func­tion of intonation is to express the speaker's attitude to the situa­tion he is placed in, and they attach these meanings not to pre-head, head and nucleus separately, but to each of ten "tone-unit types" as they combine with each of four sentence types, state­ment, question, command and exclamation.

M. Halliday supposes that English intonation contrasts are grammatical. He argues first that there is a neutral or unmarked tone choice and then explains all other choices as meaningful by contrast (59). Thus if one takes the statement "I don't know" the suggested intonational meanings are:

Low Fall — neutral Low Rise — non-committal High Rise — contradictory Fall-Rise — with reservation Rise-Fall — with commitment

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Unlike J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold, M. Halliday attributes separate significance to the pre-nuclear choices, again taking one choice as neutral and the other(s) as meaningful by contrast.

D. Crystal presents an approach based on the view "that any explanation of intonational meaning cannot be arrived at by see­ing the issues solely in either grammatical or attitudinal terms". He ignores the significance of pre-head and head choices and deals only with terminal tones. He supports R. Quirk's view that a tone unit has a falling nucleus unless there is some specific rea­son why it should not and illustrates this statement by observing that non-final structures are marked as such by the choice of low- or mid-rising or level tones (50).

There are other similar approaches which possess one feature in common: all of them pay little attention to the phonological significance of pitch level and pitch range.

The approach we outline in this book is different again. On the phonological level intonation is viewed as a complex struc­ture of all its prosodic parameters. We see the description of in­tonation structure as one aspect of the description of interaction and argue that intonation choices carry information about the structure of the interaction, the relationship between and the dis­course function of individual utterances, the international "given-ness" and "newness" of information and the state of convergence and divergence of the participants.

Now we shall have a brief outlook on how intonation func­tions as a means of communication. One of the functions of into­nation is too structure the information content of an intonation group or a phrase so as to show which information is new, as against information which the listener is assumed to possess or to be able to acquire from the context.

In oral English the smallest piece of information is associated with an intonation group, that is a unit of intonation containing the nucleus.

There is no exact match between punctuation in writing and intonation groups in speech. Speech is more variable in its struc­turing of information than writing. Cutting up speech into into­nation groups depends on such things as the speed at which you are speaking, what emphasis you want to give to the parts of the message, and the length of grammatical units. A single phrase may have just one intonation group; but when the length of phrase goes beyond a certain point (say roughly ten words), it

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is difficult not to split it into two or more separate pieces of infor­mation, e.g.

The man told us we could park it here.

The man told us | we could park it at the railway station.

The man told us | we could park it | in the street over there.

Accentual systems involve more than singling out important words by accenting them. Intonation group or phrase accentua­tion focuses on the nucleus of these intonation units. The nucle­us marks the focus of information or the part of the pattern to which the speaker especially draws the hearer's attention. The focus of information may be concentrated on a single word or spread over a group of words.

Out of the possible positions of the nucleus in an intonation group, there is one position which is normal or unmarked, while the other positions give a special or marked effect. In the exam­ple: "He's gone to the office" the nucleus in an unmarked posi­tion would occur on "office". The general rule is that, in the un­marked case, the nucleus falls on the last lexical item of the into­nation group and is called the end-focus. In this case sentence stress is normal.

But there are cases when you may shift the nucleus to an earlier part of the intonation group. It happens when you want to draw attention to an earlier part of the intonation group, usu­ally to contrast it with something already mentioned, or under­stood in the context. In the marked position we call the nucleus contrastive focus or logical sentence stress. Here are some ex­amples:

"Did your brother study in Moscow?" "ˎNo, ⌇ he was ˎborn in Moscow."

In this example contrastive meaning is signalled by the fall­ing tone .and the increase of loudness on the word "born".

Sometimes there may be a double contrast in the phrase, each contrast indicated by its own nucleus:

Her ˎ mother | is _vRussian | but her _vfather | is ˎGerman.

In a marked position, the nuclei may be on any word in an intonation group or a phrase. Even words like personal pro­nouns, prepositions and auxiliaries, which are not normally stressed at all, can receive nuclear stress for special contrastive purposes:

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It's not ˎher book, | it's ˎours.

Which syllable of the word is stressed if it has more than one syllable, is determined by ordinary conventions of word stress: to'morrow, 'picture, ˎdemons'tration.

In exceptional cases, contrastive stress in a word of more than one syllable may shift to a syllable which does not normally have word stress. For example, if you want to make a contrast between the two words normally pronounced bu'reaucracy and au'tocracy you may do so as follows: 'bureaucracy and 'autocracy.

The widening of the range of pitch of the nucleus, the in­crease of the degree of loudness of the syllable, the slowing down of the tempo make sentence accent emphatic:

A. ^→Tom has ˋpassed his exam.

B. Well ˋfancy ˋthat!

We can roughly divide the information in a message into given, or retrievable information (or the theme) and new infor­mation (or the rheme). Given information is something which the speaker assumes the hearer knows about already. New infor­mation can be regarded as something which the speaker does not assume the hearer knows about already. Here is an example;

A. What did John say to you?

B. He was ^→talking to ˎMary | not to ˎme.

In the response "He was talking" is given information; it is al­ready given by the preceding clause; "not to me" conveys new information. A new information is obviously what is most im­portant in a message, it receives the information focus, in the nu­cleus, whereas old information does not.

Given information suggests information which has already been mentioned or alluded to. But this notion may be extended by including information which is given by the situation outside language. For example, if a few different persons are expected to come, the phrase "The doctor has come" is pronounced with the nucleus on the word "doctor" though no speech context preceded it.

By putting the stress on one particular word, the speaker shows, first, that he is treating that word as the carrier of new, non-retrievable information, and, second, that the information of the other, non-emphasized, words in the intonation group is not new but can be retrieved from the context. "Context" here is to

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be taken in a very broad sense; it may include something that has already been said, in which case the antecedents may be very specific, but it may include only something (or someone) present in the situation, and it may even refer, very vaguely, to some aspect of shared knowledge which the addressee is thought to be aware of. The information that the listener needs in order to interpret the sentence may therefore be retrievable ei­ther from something already mentioned, or from the general "context of situation":

                                           from verbal context

retrievable information

                                                    from situational context

Notice that the decision as to whether some information is retrievable or not has to be made by the speaker on the basis of what he thinks the addressee can take for granted from the situa­tion, etc. The speaker must, in framing the utterance, make many assumptions, and he does this rapidly and to a large de­gree unconsciously. He then arranges his intonation groups and assigns nuclear stresses accordingly. But in any particular situa­tion, the speaker's assumptions run the risk of being wrong; what he takes to be retrievable information may not in fact be retrievable for the addressee. In this case there is a breakdown of communication, and the listener will probably seek clarification:

(A. and B. are passing the tennis courts)

A. There isn't anyone playing.

B. Who said there was? A. Nobody.

Dialogues like this, though not uncommon, are unsatisfacto­ry because vital information is missing. By putting the nucleus on "isn't" speaker A took "anyone playing" as retrievable infor­mation. В responds with a request for an explanation, which A then fails to fulfill. If A had put the original nucleus on "playing", the conversation could have proceeded normally.

Degrees of information are relevant not only to the position of sentence stress but also to the choice of the nuclear tone. We tend to use a falling tone of wide range of pitch combined with a greater degree of loudness, that is emphatic stress, to give em­phasis to the main information in a phrase. To give subsidiary or less important information, i.e. information which is more pre­dictable from the context or situation, the rising or level nuclear tone is used, e.g.

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A. I saw your sister at the game yesterday.

main subsidiary

B. Yes, watching tennis is her favourite pastime.

subsidiary main

The English language is not only a means of giving and re­ceiving information. As was stated above, it is more than this: it is communication between people. It commonly expresses the atti­tudes and emotions of the speaker and he often uses it to influence the attitudes and behaviour of the hearer. This function of intona­tion makes it "the salt of an utterance. Without it a statement can often be understood, but the message is tasteless, colourless. In­correct uses of it can lead to embarrassing ambiguities" (55).

So another use of intonation in English is that of transmitting feelings or emotions and modality. But it is fair to note here that language has to be conventional, it has more important business than transmitting feelings, and this forces it to harness emotion in the service of meaning.

As with words which may have two or more related lexical meanings so with intonation patterns one must indicate a central meaning with marginal variations from it. In English meanings of intonation patterns are largely of this general type. Most phrases and parts of them may be pronounced with several different in­tonation patterns according to the situation, according to the speaker's momentary feeling or attitude to the subject matter. These modifications can vary from surprise to deliberation, to sharp isolation of some part of a sentence for attention, to mild intellectual detachment. It would not be wise to associate a par­ticular intonation pattern with a particular grammatical con­struction. Any sentence in various contexts may receive any of a dozen other patterns, cf.:

When can you do it? — ˎNow. (detached, reserved) When did you finish? — ˋNow. (involved)

When did you come? — ˌNow. (encouraging further conversation) You are to do it right now. — ^vNow? (greatly astonished)

We have so far confined our description to the significance of intonation within phrases; we now want to discuss the function of intonation with reference to the model of discourse structure, i.e. to handle the way in which functional units combine together.

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In recent years some promising attempts have been made to describe intonation with reference to structures of discourse, rather than to grammatical categories. By discourse is meant a sequence of utterances, usually involving exchanges between two or more participants, though monologue is not excluded from this definition.

Probably the most important grammatical function of intona­tion in the language family to which English belongs is that of tying the major parts together within the phrase and tying phrases together within the text — showing, in the process, what things belong more closely together than others, where the divisions come, what is subordinate to what, and whether one is telling, asking, commanding or exclaiming.

In other words, in previous sections we have considered as­pects of meaning in isolation, but now we shall be thinking about how meanings may be put together and presented in an oral discourse. We shall start with the organization of connec­tions between phrases, with considering how one idea leads on from another. Intonation is one of the means that fulfill this con­nection or integrating function.

A phrase usually occurs among other phrases; it is, in fact, usually connected to them in some way. A phrase is most close­ly connected to its context phrases, which is often the one just preceding it. It is useful to say that a phrase is a response to its context and is relevant to that context. These notions can be il­lustrated with the following two-line dialogue:

A. Where is John?

B. He is in the house.

In this dialogue phrase A is the context for phrase B. Con­versely, В is a response to A and is relevant to A. This particular relevance may be called "answer to a special question". Rele­vance is the phenomenon that permits humans to converse. It is clear that if we treat a phrase like В in isolation, with their con­texts shipped away, relevance evaporates. That fact alone is a powerful argument for the propriety of dealing with phrases in context, for without context there is no relevance. But an even more powerful argument is this: a context phrase acts as a flood­light upon the response, revealing details about the response, and clarifying its structure and meaning. If we remove a phrase from its context we shut off that light. The very facts that we are

155

trying to understand may be obscured. Some illustrations will show what is meant.

If we take an utterance like "John" we cannot discern much about its structure or meaning. But the moment we make it rele­vant to a context, the structure and meaning leap into focus, as in the following:

Who is in the house? John.

Instantly the observer sees that the response is elliptical and that it has the underlying structure "John is in the house". It is the context that allows this interpretation. But the very same phonetic sequence "John", if taken in a different context, is re­vealed to have a completely different structure and meaning, as in the following:

Who did they see? John.

The full form of the response is "They saw John", a phrase in which the sequence "John" is now the object. Thus two exam­ples of the utterance "John" appear to be identical if taken in iso­lation, but different contexts allow us to see them as fundamen­tally different.

One and the same word sequence may be pronounced with different intonation being relevant to different contexts, e.g.

A. Did ^→John ˌphone you yesterday?       _→Did John phone you yesterday?

B. ˎNo, Tom.                                          ˎNo, ⌇ ˎTom.

Not only the use of particular pitch changes is an important means of tying intonation groups or phrases together.

Accents and particular positions of accents seem to be char­acteristic of the phrase or of the text structure. We tend to fa­vour the two extremes of the phrase, the beginning and the end, or, in longer phrases, the two extremes in an intonation group as if to announce the beginning and the end. There may be inter­mediate accents, but they are less prominent:

The ^→snow °generally °comes in Noˎvember.

Here the first strong accent is on "snow" and the last is on "November".

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Similarly there is a tendency to arrange complete parts of the text when the opening and the closing phonetic passages are more prominent than the intermediate ones thus integrating parts into a whole text, e.g.

A gentleman was much surprised when a good-looking young lady greeted him by saying "Good evening". He couldn't remember ever seeing her before.

She evidently realized that she had made a mistake, for she apologized, and explained: "Oh, I am sorry. When I first saw you I thought you were the father of my two children." She walked on while the man stared after her. She didn't realize, of course, that he was unaware of the fact that she was a school teacher.

The pitch range, the degree of loudness of the first and the last phonetic passages are comparatively higher and the tempo is definitely slower as compared to the second phonetic whole. These are just some examples of how intonation is involved in the text-structuring process which forms a good evidence^ of its integrating ability.

Many linguists in this country and abroad attempt to view intonation on the phonological level. Phonology has a special branch, intonology, whose domain is the larger units of connect­ed speech: intonation groups, phrases and even phonetic passag­es or blocks of discourse.

It is still impossible to classify, in any practical analysis of in­tonation, all the fine shades of feeling and attitude which can be conveyed by slight changes in pitch, by lengthening or shorten­ing tones, by increasing or decreasing the loudness of the voice, by changing its quality, and in various other ways. On the other hand it is quite possible to make a broad classification of intona­tion patterns which are so different in their nature that they ma­terially change the meaning of the utterance to which, they are applied, and to make different pitches and degrees of loudness in each of them. Such an analysis resembles the phonetic analysis of sounds of a language whereby phoneticians establish the number of significant sounds it uses. Applied to intonation it can be of the greatest service in guiding students in the correct use of the tones and accents they are learning.

The distinctive function of intonation is realized in the oppo­sition of the same word sequences which differ in certain param­eters of the intonation pattern.

Intonation patterns make their distinctive contribution at in­tonation group, phrase and text levels. Thus in the phrases:

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If ˎMary ˌcomes ⌇ let me →know          If →Mary ˌcomes ⌇ let me

at ˎonce. (a few people are                    → know at ˎonce. (no one

expected to come but it is                     else but Mary is expected

Mary who interests the speaker)            to come)

the intonation patterns of the first intonation groups are opposed.

In the opposition "I enˎjoyed it" — "I enˎjoyed ˌit" the pitch pattern operates over the whole phrase adding in the second phrase the notion that the speaker has reservations (implying a continuation something like "but it could have been a lot bet­ter").

In the dialogue segments which represent text units

A. You must a→pologize at ˎonce. You must aˋpologize at once.

B. I _↗don't 'see why I ˋshould.       I _→don't ˌsee why I ˎshould.

the opposition of intonation patterns of both the stimulus and the response manifests different meaning.

Any section of the intonation pattern, any of its three constit­uents can perform the distinctive function thus being phonologi­cal units. These units form a complex system of intonemes, tonemes, accentemes, chronemes, etc. These phonological units like phonemes consist of a number of variants. The terminal tonemes, for instance, consist of a number of allotones, which are mutually non-distinctive. The principal allotone is realized in the nucleus alone. The subsidiary allotones are realized not only in the nucleus, but also in the pre-head and in the tail, if there are any, cf.:

ˎNo. ˎNo, Tom. Oh, ˎno, Mary.

The most powerful phonological unit is the terminal tone. The opposition of terminal tones distinguishes different types of sentence. The same sequence of words may be interpreted as a different syntactical type, i.e. a statement or a question, a ques­tion or an exclamation being pronounced with different terminal tones, e.g.

ˎTom saw it. ˌTom saw it?

(statement) (general question)

→ Didn’t you enjoy it? → Didn't you enˎjoy it?

(general question) (exclamation)

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Will you be ˌquiet? (request)

Will you be ˎquiet? (command)

The number of terminal tones indicates the number of into­nation groups. Sometimes the number of intonation groups we choose to use may be important for meaning. For example, the sentence "My sister, who lives in the South, has just arrived" may mean two different things. In writing the difference may be marked by punctuation. In oral speech it is marked by using two or three intonation groups. If the meaning is: "My only sister who happens to live in the South...", then the division would be into three intonation groups: "My sister, ⌇ who lives in the South, ⌇ has just arrived."

On the other hand, if the meaning is: "That one of my two sisters, who lives in the South", the division is into two intona­tion groups.

Other examples:

I didn't see the doctor | be-                   I didn't see the doctor

cause I was ill (and could                       because I was ill (but for

not go).                                                  some other reason for example, to get my health card signed).

Thus, in one meaning the doctor was not seen, and in the other, he was.

Together with the increase of loudness terminal tones serve to single out the semantic centre¹ of the utterance. The words in an utterance do not necessarily all contribute an equal amount of information, some are more important to the meaning than others. This largely depends on the context or situation in which the intonation group or a phrase is said. Some words are predis­posed by their function in the language to be stressed. In Eng­lish, as you know, lexical (content) words are generally accented while grammatical (form) words are more likely to be unaccent­ed although words belonging to both of these groups may be unaccented or accented if the meaning requires it.

Let us consider the sentence "It was an unusually rainy day." As the beginning of, say, a story told on the radio the last three words would be particularly important, they form the semantic

¹ By "semantic centre" we mean the information centre which may simultane­ously concentrate the expression of attitudes and feelings.

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centre with the nucleus on the word "day". The first three words play a minor part. The listener would get a pretty clear picture of the story's setting if the first three words were not heard because of some outside noise and the last three were heard clearly. If the last three words which form the semantic centre were lost there would be virtually no information gained at all.

The same sentences may be said in response to the question "What sort of day was it?" In this case the word "day" in the re­ply would lose some of its force because the questioner already possesses the information that it might otherwise have given him. In this situation there are only two important words — "un­usually rainy" — and they would be sufficient as a complete an­swer to the question. The nucleus will be on the word "rainy". Going further still, in reply to the question "Did it rain yester-day?" the single word "unusually" would bear the major part of the information, would be, in this sense, more important than all the others and consequently would be the nucleus of the intona­tion pattern.

Grammatical words may be also important to the meaning if the context makes them so. The word "was", for instance, has had little value in the previous examples, but if the sentences were said as a contradiction in the reply to "It wasn't" a rainy day yesterday, was it?", then "was" would be the most impor­tant word of all and indeed, the reply might simply be "It was", omitting the following words as no longer worth saying. In this phrase the word "was" is the nucleus of the semantic centre.

These variations of the accentuation achieved by shifting the position of the terminal tone serve a striking example of how the opposition of the distribution of terminal tones is fulfilling the distinctive function.

There are exceptional cases when the opposition of terminal tones serves to differentiate the actual meaning of the sentence.

If the phrase "I don't want you to read anything" has the low-falling terminal tone on the word "anything", it means that for this or other reason the person should avoid reading. If the same word sequence is pronounced with the falling-rising tone on the same word, the phrase means that the person must have a careful choice in reading; or:

He's a → French ˎteacher. He's a ˎFrench teacher.

(He comes from France.) (He teaches French.)

 

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It should be pointed out here that the most important role of the opposition of terminal tones is that of differentiating the atti­tudes and emotions expressed by the speaker. The speaker must be particularly careful about the attitudes and emotions he ex­presses since the hearer is frequently more interested in the speaker's attitude or feeling than in his words — that is whether he speaks nicely or nastily.

The special question "Why?", for instance, may be pro­nounced with the low-falling tone sounding rather detached, sometimes even hostile. When pronounced with the low-rising tone it is sympathetic, friendly, interested.

Another example. The sentence "Yes" as a response to the stimulus "Did you agree with him?" pronounced with the low-falling tone sounds categoric, cool, detached. Being pronounced with the falling-rising tone it implies quite a special shade of emotional meaning "up to the point", sounding concerned, hurt, tentatively suggesting.

All the other sections of the intonation pattern differentiate only attitudinal or emotional meaning, e.g.: being pronounced with the high pre-head, "Hello" sounds more friendly than when pronounced with the low pre-head, cf.:

-Helˎlo! - Helˌlo!

More commonly, however, different kinds of pre-heads, heads, the same as pitch ranges and levels fulfill their distinctive function not alone but in the combination with other prosodic constituents.

We have been concerned with the relationship between into­nation, grammatical patterns and lexical composition. Usually the speaker's intonation is in balance with the words and struc­tures he chooses. If he says something nice, his intonation usual­ly reflects the same characteristic. All types of questions, for in­stance, express a certain amount of interest which is generally expressed in their grammatical structure and a special interroga­tive intonation. However, there are cases when intonation is in contradiction with the syntactic structure and the lexical content of the utterance neutralizing and compensating them, e.g.: a statement may sound questioning, interested. In this case into­nation neutralizes its grammatical structure. It compensates the grammatical means of expressing this kind of meaning:

Do you know what I'm here for? — ˌNo. (questioning)

6—3483

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There are cases when intonation neutralizes or compensates the lexical content of the utterance as it happens, for instance, in the command "→ Phone him at ˎonce, please", when the meaning of the word "please" is neutralized by intonation.

Lack of balance between intonation and word content, or in­tonation and the grammatical structure of the utterance may serve special speech effects. A highly forceful or exciting state­ment said with a very matter-of-fact intonation may, by its lack of balance, produce a type of irony; if one says something very complimentary, but with an intonation of contempt, the result is an insult.

There are cases when groups of intonation patterns may be treated as synonyms. It happens when fine shades of meaning in different situations modify the basic meaning they express, e.g.: the basic meaning of any falling tone in statements is finality. Low Fall and High Fall both expressing finality have their own particular semantic shades. Low Fall is used in. final, categoric detached statements. High Fall together with finality may ex­press concern, involvement:

Where's my copy? - ˎPeter took it for you.

or: - ˋPeter took it for you. Isn't it a lovely view? - Deˎlightful.

or: - Deˋlightful.

Russian permits intonational patterns of a type not found in English. It offers many examples of quite specific constituents that is of the pre-nuclear and the nuclear parts. Intonation pat­terns in Russian are usually called "Intonation constructions" (интонационные конструкции abbreviated as "ИК"). There are five main intonation constructions and two occasional ones (i.e. emphatic variants). They are differentiated according to the type of the nucleus, the pitch direction on the pre-nuclear and post-nuclear syllables, the character of the word stress and the length, tenseness and quality of the stressed vowel in syllables bearing the nuclear tone.

The intonation constructions in the Russian language are as­sociated with certain sentence types and the attitudinal meaning expressed by them is termed by the purpose of communication. We might state that the difference between English and Russian intonation lies both in structure and use.

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Our next section will be concerned with rhythmic structures of English which are formed by means of all prosodic compo­nents described in this section.

 

RHYTHM

 

Now we shall focus our attention on English rhythm. We cannot fully describe English intonation without reference to speech rhythm. Prosodic components (pitch, loudness, tempo) and speech rhythm work interdependently. Rhythm seems to be a kind of framework of speech organization. Linguists sometimes consider rhythm as one of the components of intonation. D. Crystal, for instance, views rhythmicality as one of the constit­uents of prosodic systems (50).

We would like to start by declaring rhythm to be a very gen­eral term. It is understood as periodicity in time and space. We find it everywhere in life. The work of all kinds of machinery is said to be rhythmical. In nature rhythm is observed in the succes­sions of seasons, days and nights, the changes of the moon phas­es, high and low tide. The most evident illustration of rhythm in the physiology of living beings, is the heart beating and breath­ing. Most of human activities appear to be rhythmical — swim­ming, running, skiing, knitting and other muscular movements. We very well feel and appreciate the artistic rhythm in music, dance and other fields of art.

Rhythm as a linguistic notion is realized in lexical, syntacti­cal and prosodic means and mostly in their combinations. For in­stance, such figures of speech as sound or word repetition, syn­tactical parallelism, intensification and others are perceived as rhythmical on the lexical, syntactical and prosodic levels, e.g.

"But the winter has chilled my veins, and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I shall have no roses at all this year" (O. Wilde).

Here the syntactical parallelism of the homogeneous clauses is correlated with the identical prosodic contour of the intonation groups in the phrase and is strengthened by the repetition of the conjunction "and", a stylistic device known as polysyndeton.

In this section we shall actually deal with the prosodic aspect of rhythm. Speech production is naturally closely connected

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with the process of breathing. So speech activity as well as any other human activity is conditioned by physiological factors among others and is characterized by rhythm. From the materi­alistic point of view rhythm is one of the means of matter organ­ization. The rhythmical arrangement of different phenomena of objective reality is presented in the form of periodicity, or ten­dency towards proportion and symmetry.

In speech, the type of rhythm depends on the language. Lin­guists divide languages into two groups: syllable-timed like French, Spanish and other Romance languages and stress-timed languages, such as Germanic languages English and German, as well as Russian. In a syllable-timed language the speaker gives an approximately equal amount of time to each syllable, wheth­er the syllable is stressed or unstressed and this produces the ef­fect of even rather staccato rhythm.

In a stress-timed language, of which English is a good exam­ple, the rhythm is based on a larger unit than syllable. Though the amount of time given on each syllable varies considerably, the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit is practically un­changed. The stressed syllables of a rhythmic unit form peaks of prominence. They tend to be pronounced at regular intervals no matter how many unstressed syllables are located between eve­ry two stressed ones. Thus the distribution of time within the rhythmic unit is unequal. The regularity is provided by the strong "beats".

We should like to mention here that speech rhythm has the immediate influence on vowel reduction and elision. Form words such as prepositions, conjunctions as well as auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns are usually unstressed and pronounced in their weak forms with reduced or even elided vowels to secure equal intervals between the stressed syllables, e.g.

^↘ Come and 'see me toˎmorrow. ^↘ None of them was 'any ˎgood.

The markedly regular stress-timed pulses of speech seem to create the strict, abrupt and spiky effect of English rhythm. Rus­sian rhythm is perceived as more flexible, liquid and smooth. As you probably remember the English language is an analytical one. This factor explains the presence of a considerable number of monosyllabic form words which are normally unstressed in a

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stretch of English speech. To bring the meaning of the utterance to the listener the stressed syllables of the notional words are given more prominence by the speaker and the unstressed mon­osyllabic form words are left very weak. It is often reflected in the spelling norm in the conversational style, e.g.

I'm sure you mustn't refuse him.

In teaching practice it is essential not only to stress the no­tional words properly but also to leave conjunctions, preposi­tions, auxiliary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pro­nouns reduced or elided.

Speech rhythm is traditionally defined as recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in a speech continuum. We also find a more detailed definition of speech rhythm as the regular alternation of acceleration and slowing down, of relaxation and intensification, of length and brevity, of similar and dissimilar elements within a speech event.

It has long been believed that the basic rhythmic unit is a rhythmic group, a speech segment which contains a stressed syl­lable with preceding or/and following unstressed syllables at­tached to it. The stressed syllable is the prosodic nucleus of the rhythmic group. The initial unstressed syllables preceding the nucleus are called proclitics, those following the nucleus are called enclitics. In qualifying the unstressed syllables located be­tween the stressed ones there are two main alternative views among the phoneticians. According to the so-called semantic viewpoint the unstressed syllables tend to be drawn towards the stressed syllable of the same word or to the lexical unit accord­ing to their semantic connection, concord with other words, e.g.

Negro Harlem | became | the largest | colony | of coloured people.

According to the other viewpoint the unstressed syllables in between the stressed ones tend to join the preceding stressed syl­lable. It is the so-called enclitic tendency. Then the above-men­tioned phrase will be divided into rhythmical groups as follows, e.g.

Negro Harlem | became the | largest | colony of | coloured people.

It seems that the enclitic tendency is more typical of the Eng­lish language, though in the speech flow it is sometimes difficult to define the borders of rhythmic groups. So the division into rhythmic groups is no easy matter. The rhythm-unit break is of­

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ten indeterminate. It may well be said that the speech tempo and style often regulate the division into rhythmic groups. The enc­litic tendency is more typical for informal speech whereas the se­mantic tendency prevails in accurate, more explicit speech.

The more organized the speech is the more rhythmical it ap­pears, poetry being the most extreme example of this. Prose read aloud or delivered in the form of a lecture is more rhythmic than colloquial speech. On the other hand rhythm is also individual — a fluent speaker may sound more rhythmical than a person searching for the right word and refining the structure of his phrase while actually pronouncing it.

However, it is fair to mention here that regularity in a speech chain is not realized in its exact isochronous form. Absolutely regular speech produces the effect of monotony. It means that the intervals between the stressed syllables are not physically equal. Some "strokes" may often be missing or mistimed. I. Lehiste claims that isochrony is largely a perceptual phenome­non (67). Whenever short rhythmic groups are mixed with long­er ones the speaker minimizes the differences by means of changes in his rate of delivery. Any number of unstressed sylla­bles occurring between the stressed ones are actually com­pressed to allow the next stressed syllable to come on the regu­lar beat. Now the listener tends to equalize the groups he per­ceives. In other words the length of the intervals is perceived by the listener as equal despite the changing number of unstressed syllables between the peaks of the rhythmic groups, e.g.

Speech is nothing more | than a series of rough hints | which the hearer must interpret | in order to arrive at the meaning which the speaker wishes to convey (H. Palmer).

Learners of English should be recommended to beat the rhythm while reading sentences of this kind.

The most frequent type of a rhythmic group includes 2-4 syl­lables, one of them stressed, others unstressed. In phonetic litera­ture we find a great variety of terms defining the basic rhythmic unit, such as an accentual group or a stress group which is a speech segment including a stressed syllable with or without un­stressed syllables attached to it; a pause group — a group of words between two pauses, or breath group — which can be ut­tered within a single breath. As you have probably,, noticed, the criteria for the definition of these units are limited by physiologi­

166

cal factors. The term "rhythmic group" used by most of the lin­guists (see 67, 57, 2) implies more than a stressed group or breath group. I. V. Zlatoustova (18) terms it "rhythmic structure". Most rhythmic groups are simultaneously sense units. A rhyth­mic group may comprise a whole phrase, like "I can't do it" or just one word: "Unfortunately..." or even a one-syllable word: "Well..."; "Now...". So a syllable is sometimes taken for a mini­mal rhythmic unit when it comes into play. Indeed the rhythmic tendency of accentuation in polysyllabic words helps to secure periodicity of dynamic peaks in an utterance. K. Pike finds the term "waves" for rhythm periodicity to be very expressive (72).

Now we must admit that the traditional understanding of rhythm as a regularity of recurrence of stressed syllables was sufficient enough until the main object of linguistic investigations was a written sentence or a phrase in oral discourse. The investi­gation of the spoken text as a linguistic unit has contributed a lot to the treatment of rhythm since the text as a whole grew the object of analysts' attention. In the present-day linguistics rhythm is analysed as a system of similar adequate elements. A. M. Antipova (2) defines rhythm as a complex language system which is formed by the interrelation of lexical, syntactic and pro­sodic means. Prosody creates similarity and isochrony of speech elements. In view of what has just been said it would be perfect­ly natural to admit that the sphere of rhythm functioning is actu­ally very wide. Rhythmicality marks every text segment: rhyth­mic groups, intonation groups, phrases and phonopassages. The recurrence of similar and commensurate text segments makes them rhythmic units. The rhythmic effect of the text units is ob­tained by the prosodic parameters, the pitch of the voice, loud­ness, duration. In fact not only the actual pitch of the voice but its level and range, pausation and other phenomena of a stretch of speech form rhythm constituents. The detailed prosodic anal­ysis of the oral text which is termed by O. S. Akhmanova "fra-sirovka" reveals its rhythmicality. Combinations of the markers are more frequent and effective. In her fundamental work based on the instrumental analysis of English speech A. M. Antipova comes to the conclusion that the rhythmic structure of speech continuum is a hierarchy of rhythmical units of different levels. Each text unit is capable of fulfilling the rhythmic function. It is worth mentioning that the notion of prosodic similarity is very flexible. The rhythm constituents vary not only in different

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rhythm units but also in different speech realizations, different linguistic activities.

We undoubtedly observe the most striking rhythmicality in poetry. You may have found from reading poetry in your own language that you can often enjoy a poem without fully under­standing its meaning. It is possible to pay more attention to the way a poet says something rather than to what he actually has to say. Enjoyment, however, must not be confused with appreci­ation. It is one thing to gain pleasure from a poem and quite an­other to be able to say why you liked it. It is hard to define ex­actly why it gives us pleasure. However, the subject matter of a poem is not necessarily the most important thing about it. Any poem sets out to convey a great deal more than an idea and it is this that distinguishes it from prose. The most common types of poetry are: descriptive, reflective, narrative, the lyric and the sonnet. The ability to distinguish between them helps to under­stand more readily what a poet's intentions are. To demonstrate the types of verse we have chosen the blocks of poetry which illustrate the stylistic devices discussed further on.

Descriptive are poems which describe people or experiences, scenes or objects.

Lucy

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

— Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky. (W. Wordsworth)

Reflective are thoughtful poems often containing a great deal of description which the poet comments on or from which he draws conclusions. Sometimes these conclusions are directly stated, at other times implied.

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