Utebayeva Botagoz

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Intonation and its components

Intonation is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words; instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signaling the difference between statements and questions, and between different types of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation in some languages distinguishes words, either lexically or grammatically. (The term tone is used by some British writers in their descriptions of intonation but to refer to the pitch movement found on the nucleus or tonic syllable in an intonation unit.)

Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, it is important to be aware that functions attributed to intonation such as the expression of attitudes and emotions, or highlighting aspects of grammatical structure, almost always involve concomitant variation in other prosodic features. David Crystal for example says that "intonation is not a single system of contours and levels, but the product of the interaction of features from different prosodic systems – tone, pitch-range, loudness, rhythmicality and tempo in particular."

The main functions of intonation:

a) Sentence - forming (constitutive): Intonation, along with words and grammatical structure, is an indispensable feature.

b) Sentence — delimiting: The end of a sentence is always recognized by a pause varying length combined with a moving (or nuclear) tone on the most important word of the sentence; the end of a non-final sense — group is usually signaled by a sorter pause in combination with a nuclear tone on the semantic centre of the sense — group.

c) Distinctive: It is apparent from the fact that communicatively different types of sentences are distinguished by intonation alone. It also serves to distinguish communicative types of sentences, the actual meaning of a sentence. Intonation is also a powerful means of differentiating functional styles.

d) Attitudinal: Attitudinal meanings (the mood of the speaker, his attitude to the situation and to the listener) are also expressed only by intonation.

One and the same word sequence may express different meaning when pronounced I with a different intonation pattern, e.g.

—Don't I, know it? (General question), Don't I know it? (Exclamation) 'Don't do, that. (Serious) —-Don't do .that, (appealing to the listener)

It is necessary to point out here that on the acoustic level pitch correlates with the fundamental frequency of the vibration of the vocal cords; oddness correlates with the amplitude of vibrations; tempo is a correlate of time during which a speech unit lasts.

Intonation is about how we say things, rather than what we say. Without intonation, it's impossible to understand the expressions and thoughts that go with words.

Listen to somebody speaking without paying attention to the words: the 'melody you hear is the intonation.

Intonation doesn’t exist in isolation. So it makes sense to approach it together with other factors.

The term intonation is difficult to delimit precisely but its narrowest sense of the melodic aspect of the language, excluding the question of which syllables may be stressed and which not in words or higher linguistic units, is the one intended here. Admittedly most writers on English intonation have treated "sentence stress" as part of intonation including Jones, Kingdon and Halliday. The problem of accentuation, chiefly of tonic placement is a very great one, probably responsible for as many serious failures in EFL performance as any other feature of English. However, some teachers seem to be under the mistaken impression that intonation proper is an area of great difficulty or at least importance for them – as great as or even greater than tonicity.

An examination of the literature of advice on EFL intonation reveals astonishingly few specific examples of observed errors attributed to EFL speakers with particular mother tongues. Tonicity aside, there are none at all in Palmer (1922), Armstrong and Ward (1926), Halliday (1970), O'Connor-&-Arnold (1973) or Gimson (1980). The last of these gave general warnings against unintentional impressions that might result from an over-use of rises or from too many falls but offered no illustrations of the possibilities even though attention was drawn later, perhaps puzzlingly to many readers, to the necessity for the ambitious student to note that frequent use of falls on pre-nuclear accented syllables is a common feature of natural discourse. Gimson clearly excluded intonation, accentuation patterning aside, from those characteristics of pronunciation which ... constitute a priority for the great majority of learners.

The most important reason why specific national etc problems are so rarely to be found dealt with is largely the rather heartening one that there are indeed very few of them. The first book ever to mention any was the Daniel Jones Outline of English Phonetics which in and those following cited (after eight French mis-accentuations and five German ones) an example of a German use of rise instead of normal level and a Swedish transfer of a falling tone which, though non-accentual in Swedish would strike English ears as a false accentuation (eg of the second syllable of London as well as the first). The 1932 revision added a second German problem of substituting high-level for low-rise tones within complex sentences and the Norwegian one of substituting rising for what in English usage would be final (and pre-final) descending tones. The only other point made was that most learners find great difficulty in learning to make a fall-rise on a word of a single syllable.

Intonation organizes words into sentences, distinguishes between different types of sentences, and adds emotional coloring to utterances. English intonation is quite difficult for Kazakh students. Developing the ability to hear, understand, and reproduce sentence stress in speech is the main prerequisite to mastering English intonation. Let's sum up the functions of sentence stress.

Sentence stress organizes the words in the sentence into logically connected thought groups by joining the unstressed syllables to the main stressed syllable in the group and marking the end of the thought group with a slight pause if necessary.

If necessary, sentence stress singles out the most important word in the sentence by giving it emphatic stress.

Sentence stress marks the end of the sentence by giving the strongest stress to the last stressed syllable with the help of falling or rising intonation. It's not possible, of course, to learn sentence stress and rhythm just by talking about them. Listening and repeating should become the most important part of your work on pronunciation. You should always choose the textbooks that come with corresponding listening materials. When you practice repeating sentences after the recorded speaker, always mark sentence stress and reduced unstressed words.

Students usually find it useful to practice stress and rhythm working with those audio materials in which speech is not too fast and sentence stress is very clear.

The songs for listening in the section Hobby are also a useful means for learning English stress and rhythm. First listen to the songs in which pronunciation, stress, and rhythm are very clear, for example, Queen - The Show Must Go On or David Coverdale and Whitesnake - Don't Fade Away. Then try repeating the lyrics of the songs with the stress and rhythm that you hear in the song. You'll be surprised how quickly your pronunciation will improve with the help of the songs if you practice singing or saying the words loudly together with the singer.

REFERENCES

1. Bryant, G. A., & Fox Tree, J. E. Recognizing verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Metaphor and Symbol. New York. 2002

2. Lee, C. J & Katz, A. N. The differential role of ridicule in sarcasm and irony. Metaphor and Symbol. London, 1998

3. The Modern Satiric Grotesque. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1991.