INTONATION:

INTONATION:

1. Also known as prosody or suprasegmentals

2. Melody of the speech

3. STUDIES

   • How does the pitch of the voice rise and fall?
   • How do speakers use the pitch variation to convey linguistic and pragmatic meaning?
   • The rhythm of speech
   • How the interplay of accented, stressed and unstressed syllables function as a framework onto which the intonation patterns are attached?

4. Almost any intonation pattern is possile in English, but thy may have different meaning

5. PROSODIC FEATURES

   • Rhythm of the speech
     • Pitch, loudness and speed combined with silence (pause)
   • Stress
     • Combination of loudness, pitch and duration
     • 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.
     • English is a stress language
       • Stress is an important part of the spoken identify of an English word
   • Tone
     • Differences in the pitch of the voice
       • High level, mid-level, low level, rising or falling
     • Some language use tone lexically
       • The words have different meanings depending on the tone with which it is said
       • English does not use tone lexically; it uses tone for intonation

6. Speakers of English have to make three decisions

   • Tonality
     • The division of thee spoken material into chunks
   • Tonicity
     • The words on which the speaker focuses the hearer's attention
   • Tone
     • The pitch movement the speaker is going to associate with tonicity
       • A fall indicates that the information is complete
       • A rise or rise-fall indicates that there is something more to come

7. FUNCTIONS OF ENGLISH INTONATION

   • The attitudinal function
     • To express attitudes and emotions
   • The grammatical function
     • To identify grammatical structures in speech
     • To distinguish clause types, such as question vs. statement, and to disambiguate various grammatically ambiguous structures
   • The focusing function
     • To show what information in an utterance is new and what is already known
   • The discourse function
     • To signal how sequences of clauses and sentences go together in spoken discourse, to contrast or to cohere
   • The psychological function
     • To organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, memorize and perform
   • The indexical function
     • Just as with other pronunciation features, intonation may act as a marker of personal or social identity.

8. When English language assume that English is like their own first language...

   • They transfer the intonation from L1 to L2
     • Positive transfer
       • When the elements of intonation are the same in English and in the L1. E.g. German
     • Negative transfer
       • When the elements of intonation of English are not used in the same way as in the L1. E.g. French
   • Interference from L1 as inappropriate elements are transferred