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What role does intonation play in the language? Our further interests move towards some notion of communicative competence and away from the lesser ability to produce and understand grammatical sentences, the greater is the pressure one feels to take proper account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of the act of speech. We are beginning to realize more and more that engagement with intonation is not merely a "cosmetic" or "decorative" exercise, comparatively unimportant, but that in fact it leads one to a consideration of some quite fundamental aspects of the communicative process. Unfortunately many teachers have preferred to concentrate their attention upon the study of sounds with the result that the study of intonation is tended to lag behind. One reason for this state of affairs is that a very special skill is required in the recognition of intonation variations, fins skill is more difficult to acquire than the ability recognize strange sounds for two reasons. There is wide agreement among Soviet linguists that on perception level intonation is a complex, a whole, formed by significant variations of pitch, loudness and tempo (i.e. the rate of speech and pausation) closely related. Some Soviet linguists regard speech timbre as the fourth component of intonation. As a matter of fact, up to now timbre has not been sufficiently investigated yet. Neither its material form nor its linguistic function have been thoroughly described Though speech timbre definitely conveys certain shades of attitudinal or emotional meaning there is no good reason to consider it alongside with the three prosodic components of intonation, i.e. pitch, loudness and tempo. We would like to point out that many foreign scholars have been anxious to
restrict the formal definition of intonation to pitch movement alone, though occasionally allowing in variations of loudness as well .We are firmly convinced that when the question of intonational meaning is raised it is clearly not possible to
restrict the term "intonation" by the pitch parameters only because generally all the
three prosodic parameters function as a whole though in many cases the priority of
the pitch parameter is quite evident. It is necessary to point out here that on the acoustic level pitch correlates with the fundamental frequency of me vibration of the vocal cords; loudness correlates with the amplitude of vibrations; tempo is a correlate of time during which a speech unit lasts. Uzbek phoneticians F. Abdurahmanov, A. Suloymonov, H. Holiyorov,
G. Omonturdiev say "Интонация тушунчаси овознинг кўтарилиши пасайиши,
сўниши, шунингдек, урғу, пауза, ритмика, мелодика каби ҳодисаларни ўз
ичига олади"1.
Sentence-stress is the second primary component of intonation. Its main functions are to single out words in a sentence, according to their relative semantic importance, and to provide an adequate rhythmical structure of a sentence. Sentence stress falls on a syllable, but characterizes rhythmic groups, syntagmas, sentences, sentence units. So, sentence stress is the distribution of speech energy among the words of the system. Examples:
1) «A 'well — known/writer' was 'once 'traveling inASpain.»
In this sentence we can see two syntagmas, the first syntagma contains two rhythmic groups and the second three.
2) «In the/'kitchen a /woman was 'cooking "\ supper»1
In this sentence we can see three syntagmas; the first syntagma forms one rhythmic group, and so does the second, the third syntagma contains two rhythmic groups, In English we have the following degrees of stress:
a) no stress [•],
b) weak stress [,],
c) syntactic (or ordinary) sentence stress ['],
1 Ф. Абдурахманов. Хозирги узбек адабий тили. Тош-1979. "Укитувчи" P 9.
d) logic: stress (predicative, contrast, modal) [v].3
According to K.P. Gintovi1 the three types of logic stress are:
1) predicative logic stress: «He is \ ill, | «don't л bother him»;
2) contrast logic stress: «vHe was a "\doctor | and 'she was
3) modal logic stress: «lt\is nice to ,see you a,gain»;
4) emphatic stress["].
The functions of these degrees of sentence stress are:
1) weak stress or absence of stress help to organize phonetically those syntagmas which contain second-rate information (parenthesis or direct address in the second and third positions, afterthought, apposition, etc.). Examples:
a) «Shall I love you?» said the swallow, who, liked /to the, point at -/once.»
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