Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №2 Course paper Theme: General principiles of vowel formation

Intonation. Prosodic units.
Intonation is a complex unity of non-segmental, or prosodic features of speech: melody (pitch of the voice); sentence stress; temporal characteristics (duration, tempo, pausation); rhythm; timber (voice quality). It organizes a sentence, determines communicative types of sentences and clauses, divides sentences into intonation groups, gives prominence to words and phrases, expresses contrasts and attitudes. There are two main approaches to the problem of intonation in Great Britain. One is known as a contour analysis and the other may be called grammatical. The first is represented by a large group of phoneticians. Their theory is based on the assumption that intonation consists of basic functional "blocks". They pay much attention to these "blocks" but not to the way they are connected. The most phoneticians in our country agree, that intonation express the speakers thoughts, emotions and attitude towards the hearer. Intonation is a broad phenomena, which is realized in a number of prosodic units. The main of them are: the syllable, the rhythmic unit, the utterance. The syllable is the smallest prosodic unit, which constitutes higher units. Its prosodic features depend on its position and function in a rhythmic unit. The rhythmic unit is a number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Unstressed are called clities, stressed-nucleus. The unstressed syl. preceding the nucleus are called proclitics, following-enclitics. All this proves that the r.g. is a separate prosodic unit. The i.g. Various phoneticians use dif. terms: breath g., sense g., syntagme, tone-g., etc.
Utterance stress and Rhythm
Sentence stress is the second component of prosody. It’s a certain prominence given to one or more words in a sentence, that are semantically more important than the others. The effect of stress is produced by vibration in pitch, loudness. Length and quality. The subsystem of utterance stress in English includes 3 basic types: nuclear stress; non-nuclear stress; partial stress. The main difference between them is how the syllables that carry them are marked. Nuclear stress is marked by the kinetic tones, non-nuclear stressed syllables are marked by static tones, partially stressed syllables are not pitch prominent. Their pitch characteristics depend on the pitch pattern of the preceding fully stressed syllable. The distribution of stress in a phrase is determined by several factors: semantic factor (notional parts of speech are usually stressed, auxiliary parts of speech are not). The stresses are on those words to which the speaker wants to attract special attention. Thus, the semantic factor determines the location, the type and the degree of stress. (! The nuclear tone attracts more attention than static tone of fully stressed in an utterance); grammatical factor (eg You must do it?/Must you do it? ( The inverted word order presupposes the appearance of the stress on the words which are not usually stressed); rhythmical (eg safe and sound; neat and tidy; slim and slender). English speakers favor the constructions that have rhythmic alternation (чередование). Rhythm.It is considered to be the third component of prosody. Though rhythmic units have different number of syllables they tend to follow one another at regular intervals. In rhythmic groups of unequal length the syllables of the longer groups are compressed by very rapid pronunciation.