Intonation and Logical Sentence Stress

       The main function of any language is communication. But language is not only the means of giving and receiving information. It expresses the attitude and emotions of the speaker, and it’s used as means of influencing people. The speech is shaped with intonation contours according to the situation and the speaker’s attitude. Intonation serves to convey feelings and modality.

       Cutting up speech into intonation groups depends on things, such as the speed which you are speaking at, the length of utterances and emphasis you want to give to some parts of your message. We can divide the information in your message into given, or the theme, and the new, or the rheme.

       Given information is the information which the listener knows. New information is the information which the listener doesn’t know. It is the most important in the message. It is connected with the logical sentence stress, and is sometimes called the logical center of the sentence. It receives the information focus in the nucleus, which may be shifted in this case from its normal place on the last stressed word to one of the preceding words of the intonation group.

       The logical center and logical stress may be on any word in an intonation group. Even words that are usually unstressed may receive nuclear stress and become the logical center of the utterance.

e. g. `He did it. You `should do it. It’s not `your pen, it’s mine.

       Because of the differences of structures of Russian and English there is a considerable difference in the structures of Russian and English tone groups.

e. g. Один школьник, усердно занимавшийся арифметикой, приехал летом домой на каникулы.

A school boy, who had been working a good deal at arithmetic, came home one summer for his holiday.

In the Russian variant only one word is unstressed (на), in English there are ten unstressed words: a, who, had, been, a, good, at, one, for, his.

The Degrees of Intonation

       The degrees of intonation and its importance may be presented in an utterance not only by the position by the sentence stress, but also by the choice of the nuclear tone. For example, the falling tone combined with a degree of loudness serves to present the most important information. The less important information is connected with the rising or level tone.

       Usually, the speaker’s intonation is in balance with the words and structures he chooses in speech. But there are cases when intonation is in contradiction with the syntactic structures and lexis of the utterance. In such cases intonation neutralizes the grammatical structure.

e. g. Do it `immediately, please. – command

Rhythm

       In general, rhythm is a regular recurrence of some phenomenon in time and space. Rhythmically the seasons change, our routine of life is rhythmical. But speech activity, like any other human activity, is conditioned by physiological factors. It is usually and naturally connected with the process of breathing.

       Speech rhythm as a linguistic notion is realized in lexical, syntactical and prosodic means and, as a rule, in their combinations.

There are two kinds of speech rhythm which depend upon the language. Every language is spoken with one kind of rhythm or the other.

In the one kind, known as a syllable-timed rhythm, the syllables occur at equal intervals of time. They are isochronous. Syllable-timed languages are Spanish, French and other Roman languages. In the other kind, known as a stressed-timed rhythm, the stressed syllables are isochronous. Russian and English are stressed-timed languages. In English the rhythm is based on a larger unit that syllable.

The amount of time given on each syllable varies considerably. But the total time of uttering each rhythmic unit is practically unchanged.

A sense group in English is divided into rhythmical groups. There are as many rhythmical groups in a sense group as there are stressed syllables. A minimal rhythmical group consists of nothing but a stressed syllable. But most rhythmical groups consist of a stressed syllable and one or more unstressed ones. In ordinary speech, especially in prose, the number of unstressed syllables between each consecutive pair of stresses varies considerably. Speech rhythm influences vowel reduction and elision. Form words are usually unstressed and are pronounced in their weak form to secure equal intervals between stressed syllables. The stress-timed speech creates the strict and abrupt effect of English rhythm. Russian rhythm is perceived as more flexible.

The basic rhythmic unit is rhythmic group, that is a speech segment which contains a stressed syllable with preceding and/or following unstressed syllables which are attached to it. The stressed syllable is the nucleus of the rhythmic group. The initial unstressed syllables preceding the nucleus are called proclitics. Those following the nucleus are called enclitics.

In general, there are some basic rules of English rhythm:

1. The stressed syllables in a sense group follow each other at regular intervals of time, and only in very long rhythmic groups which contain many unstressed syllables this regularity is not observed strictly.

2. Most non-initial rhythmic groups begin with a stressed syllable. Unstressed syllables which occur inside a sense group have a tendency to cling to the preceding stressed syllables, thus forming its enclitics. Only initial unstressed syllables always cling to the following stressed syllables, thus forming its proclitics.

3. The greater the number of unstressed syllables is located between the stressed ones, the more rapidly they are pronounced.

4. Initial unstressed syllables are always pronounced rapidly.

5. Each sense group has a rhythm of its own. It depends on the degree of semantic importance given to it in comparison with the other sense groups of the utterance.