Intonation is a complex unity of four components, formed by communicatively relevant variations in:
1. voice pitch, or speech melody;
2. the prominence of words, or their accent;
3. the tempo (rate), rhythm and pausation of the utterance;
4. voice-timbre, this complex unity serving to express adequately, on the basic of the proper grammatical structure and lexical composition of sentence, the speaker’s or writer’s thoughts, volition, emotions, feelings and attitudes towards reality and the content of the sentence.
Speech melody is the variations in the pitch of the voice which take place when voiced sounds, especially vowels and sonorants, are pronounced in connected speech. The speech melody is produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords.
Stress in speech (loudness) is the greater prominence which is given to one or more words of the same sentence. In English this greater prominence is achieved by uttering the stressed words with greater force of exhalation and muscular tension than the unstressed words, as well as by a change in pitch and an increase in the length of stressed syllables of words in the sentence.
The voice quality (timbre) is a special colouring of the voice in pronouncing sentences and shows the speaker’s emotions, such as joy, sadness, irony, anger, etc.
The tempo of speech is the speed with which sentences or their parts are pronounced. It is determined by the rate at which speech sounds are uttered and by the number and length of pauses. Closely connected with the tempo of speech is rhythm: the recurrence of stressed syllables at more or less equal intervals of time. Therefore, the tempo and rhythm of speech may be said to constitutive the temporal component of intonation. Each syllable of the speech chain has a special pitch colouring and bears a definite amount of loudness. Pitch movements are inseparably connected with loudness. Together with the tempo of speech they form an intonation pattern which is the basic unit of intonation.
Jones D. writes: “Intonation may be defined as the variations which take place in the pitch of the voice in connected speech, i.e. variations in the pitch of the musical note produced by the vibration of the vocal cords”. [Jones, 29]
Armstrong L. and Ward I. define intonation as follows: “By intonation, we mean the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice when we speak”. [Armstrong, 19]
As far as the intonational aspect of pronunciation is concerned a special attention must be drawn to the fact that every English expression should be pronounced with an appropriate kind of intonation in the sense that intonational contour should serve, first and foremost a particular syntactic purpose. In other words it should express either finality or non-finality in full accordance with the context.
Intonation has the following functions: [Dickushina, 134]
1. Semantic function, for it determines the communicative type of sentences,
2. Grammatical function, for it determines the grammatical type of a sentence or a clause,
3. Intonation enables us to express our emotions or our attitude to persons and things,
4. Segmentational function, for it marks out syntagms (sense-groups) thus making our speech intelligible.
It goes without saying that intelligibility is the most vital requirement in so far as human communication by means of language is concerned. “In phonetics intelligibility is a measure of how comprehendible speech is, or the degree to which speech can be understood. It is affected by spoken clarity, explicitness, lucidity, comprehensibility, perspicuity and precision”. (http//en.wikipedia.org/intelligibility)
It is common knowledge that speech is always split up into parts or segments. Here the segmentational function of intonation plays an important role.
Utterances are units of communication. It is therefore indispensable that the natural interruption in the flow of speech should occur at the end of sense-groups to bring out the purport of the utterance.
Hence we deal with the problem of juncture. Phonetically juncture is the cessation of voice enhanced by the prolongation of the preceding sound or sounds accompanied by a change in the intonational contour. Syntactically it is a kind of rhythmic-melodic cadence whose function consists in segmenting speech into sense-groups. A sense-group marked off by a juncture is called a Syntagm. The latter is coterminous with the breath-groups, being singled out in the flow of speech by pauses and other intonational means. e.g.
But still, | the two unprotected ones must be sheltered from him.
(“The Lost Girl” by D.H. Lawrence, Chapter 1, p. 14)
