INTONATION:

INTONATION:

Also known as prosody or suprasegmentals
Melody of the speech
STUDIES
1. How does the pitch of the voice rise and fall?
2. How do speakers use the pitch variation to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning?
3. The rhythm of speech
4. How the interplay of accented, stressed and unstressed syllables function as a framework onto which the intonation patterns are attached?
Almost any intonation pattern is possile in English, but thy may have different meaning
PROSODIC FEATURES
1. Rhythm of the speech
  1. Pitch, loudness and speed combined with silence (pause)
2. Stress
  1. Combination of loudness, pitch and duration
  2. Some languages use stress placement lexically (the difference of meaning depends entirely upon the location of the stress), as Greek; but other languages do no, as French.
  3. English is a stress language
    1. Stress is an important part of the spoken identify of an English word
3. Tone
  1. Differences in the pitch of the voice
    1. High level, mid-level, low level, rising or falling
  2. Some language use tone lexically
    1. The words have different meanings depending on the tone with which it is said
    2. English does not use tone lexically; it uses tone for intonation
Speakers of English have to make three decisions
1. Tonality
  1. The division of thee spoken material into chunks
2. Tonicity
  1. The words on which the speaker focuses the hearer's attention
3. Tone
  1. The pitch movement the speaker is going to associate with tonicity
    1. A fall indicates that the information is complete
    2. A rise or rise-fall indicates that there is something more to come
FUNCTIONS OF ENGLISH INTONATION
1. The attitudinal function
  1. To express attitudes and emotions
2. The grammatical function
  1. To identify grammatical structures in speech
  2. To distinguish clause types, such as question vs. statement, and to disambiguate various grammatically ambiguous structures
3. The focusing function
  1. To show what information in an utterance is new and what is already known
4. The discourse function
  1. To signal how sequences of clauses and sentences go together in spoken discourse, to contrast or to cohere
5. The psychological function
  1. To organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, memorize and perform
6. The indexical function
  1. Just as with other pronunciation features, intonation may act as a marker of personal or social identity.
When English language assume that English is like their own first language...
1. They transfer the intonation from L1 to L2
  1. Positive transfer
    1. When the elements of intonation are the same in English and in the L1. E.g. German
  2. Negative transfer
    1. When the elements of intonation of English are not used in the same way as in the L1. E.g. French
2. Interference from L1 as inappropriate elements are transferred

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	Created by Caro Osorio over 8 years ago