The stress in compound and polysyllabic words

INTONATION, ITS COMPONENTS AND FUNCTIONS

Intonation is a unity of:

• 
  speech melody (variations in the pitch of the voice)
  
• 
  timbre (tonal colouring of the speaker’s voice)
  
• 
  sentence stress (relative degree of prominence given to various words in a sentence)
  
• 
  temporal characteristics(duration, pauses, tempo)
  
• 
  rhythm (periodic recurrence of rhythmic units of different size and level).
  

Functions of Intonation:

1) Delimiting – delimitation of utterances and parts of utterances in the speech flow

2) Syntactical – reflecting the syntactical relations in the sentence

3) Accentual – indicating more or less important elements of the utterance through contrasts in the degree of prominence of its different parts

4) Attitudinal (modal) – conveying the speaker’s attitude to the subject-matter and to the communicative situation