3. Graphical representation of intonation

There are a variety of methods for recording intonation patterns in writing. The one we are using is favoured by most of the British phoneticians (D. Jones, R. Kingdom, J. O’Connor) and G. Arnold, M. Halliday, D. Crystal... as well as by Soviet phoneticians who have successfully developed and improved it. Not only variations of pitch but also stressed syllables are marked. Distinct modifications of pitch in the nuclear syllable are indicated by special symbols (by an upwars and a downward or a slantwise stressmark). Plus pitch movements in the pre-nuclear part are indicated (again by the arrows before the first stressed syllable).

A vertical bar | represents a pause at the end of the intonation group.

The tone mark – a long arrow pointing up or down – is put before the first stressed syllable (the beginnig of the head) and it shows the general direction of the voice movement. Other stressd syllables are marked with a short vertical bar before and above them ′.

4. Rhythm.

Prosodic components of intonation (pitch, loudness, tempo) and rhythm work interdependantly. Sometimes rhythm is even regarded as a component of intonation. It is understood as periodicity in time and space as a general term. As a longuistic notion it is realized in lexical, syntactical and prosodic means. Here in this course we deal with the prosodic aspect of rhythm.

In speech, the type of rhythm depends on the language. Linguists devide languages into two groups: syllable-timed where speaker give an approximately equal amount of time to each syllable, whether the syllable is stressed or not – this produces the effect of even rather stacatto rhythm (French, Spanish and other Romance languages) and stress-timed languages where 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 unchanged – the stressed syllables of rhythmic unit form peaks of prominence and they tend to be pronounce at regular intervals no matter how many unstressed syllables are located between every two stressed ones – the distribution of time within the rhythmic unit is unregular and the regularity is provided by the strong “beats” – regular stress-timed pulses of speech seem to create the strict, abrupt and spiky effect (Germanic languages like English and German and also Russian belongs here).

It’s interesting to note that speech rhythn of stress-timed languages has the immediate influence on vowel reduction and elision. Form words (such as - ? – prepositions, conjunctions, auxilary and modal verbs, personal and possessive pronouns) are pronounced in their weak forms with their vowels reduced or elided to secure equal intervals between the stressed syllables.

So the definition of speech rhythm is: recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time in a speech continuum.

The more organized the speech is, the more rhythmical it appears, poetry being the most exttreme example of this. Prose read aloud or delivered in the form of the lectureis more rhythmic than colloquial language. Although it’s fair to mention that intervals between the stressed syllables are not absolutely physically equal – some strokes can be missing or mistimed.

It is believed that the basic rhythmic unit is a rhythmic group – a speech segment which contains a stressed syllable with preceding or/and following unstressed syllable attached to it. The stressed sylable is the prosodic nucleus of the rhythmic group. The initial unstressed syllables preceding the nucleus are calles proclitics, those followin the nucleus – enclitics. In qualifying the unstressd syllables located between the stressed ones there are two main alternative views among phoneticians:

1. Acording to the so-calles 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.

2. According to the other viewpoint the unsrressed syllbles tend to join the preceding stressed syllable – it’s called enclitic tendency. And it seems to be more typical of the English language, though in the speech flow it’s always difficult to define the borders of the rhythmic groups. It may 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 basic rhythmic unit is defined in a variety of terms: accentual or stress group, pause group – a group of words between two pauses, breath group – which can be uttered within a single breath. But the criteria for definition of these units are limited by physiological factors.Whereas a rhythmic group is simultaneously a sense unit.