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The definition of prosody. Functions of prosody (29)

By prosody the majority of linguists mean constant physical or acoustic characteristics of speech (spectrum) and absence of speech signal. P. is something that organizes our speech.

Prosody is “a term used in suprasegmental phonetics and phonology to refer collectively to variations in pitch, loudness, tempo and rhythm”. (Crystal). Recently voice quality has been added to the list of prosodic features.

Functions

Structural function

The speaker has to organize and the listener has to identify the hierarchy of information units starting from the most prominent syllable in a word, the most prominent word in an intonation group, the varying prominence and the cohesion of intonation groups in longer utterances, such as speech paragraphs or the whole text. Pitch, length and loudness help to restore the key concepts of the situation posited in speech act, to get the structural vision of the speech act.

In a dialogue or polilogue the speaker – listener interaction is reflected in the unity of one topic for discussion shared by all the participants, with key words brought out by prosodic means, followed by special boundary tones, pitch range and tempo variation to signal transition to a new topic.

Information structuring is more evident in radio newsreading, sports commentary (changes in prosody reflect the progress of the action).

It is subdivided into:

constitutive function. It presupposes the integrative function on the one hand when intonation arranges intonation groups into bigger syntactic units: sentences, texts. If it were not for this function, we would hear separate words at the same pitch.
intergrative.
delimitative. It manifests itself when intonation divides texts, syntactic wholes and sentence units that is intonation groups.

ex. He washed and brushed his \hair.

He  washed and brushed his \hair.

Social function

Our oral speech can give info to the listener about his gender, age, education, place – domain of prosody. Prosody is an important marker of personal or social identity: lawyers, preachers, newscasters, army sergeants are readily identified through their distinctive prosody. For example: I higher and wider pitch range accompanied by slower tempo with perfect timing is a sign of dominance, while a faster tempo and a narrow pitch range is a feature of submissiveness. It is also customary to demonstrate deference to higher rank and older age by varying one’s tempo and loudness, using specific, culturally accepted pitch patterns. Among the conventional formulae (‘Ladies and gentlemen…’) there are prosodic patterns of greetings, leave talks, thanks, apologies, etc. (Thanks, Dad. Morning. Give me a minute. No problem.) which all suit the common pattern fall + rise or fall + level, the obvious connotations being to keep contact with the listener.

Aesthetic

It means general impression from the person’s speech (harmony (благозвучие) or not).

Stylistic

Each functional style and each function of speech has its own characteristics in melody, tempo, loudness, voice quality, pause. Official style (frequent use of the gradually descending scale, greater degree of loudness, slower tempo of speech), colloquial style (lowered degree of loudness, great number of hesitation pauses).

Degrees of stress in English & Russian. Differences in the articulatory bases in English & Russian in terms of the accentual structure of words

Languages are also differentiated according to the place of word stress. The traditional classification of languages concerning place of stress in a word is into those with a fixed stress and those with a free stress. In languages with a fixed stress the occurrence of the word stress is limited to a particular syllable in a polysyllabic word. For instance, in French the stress falls on the last syllable of the word (if pronounced in isolation), in Finnish and Czech it is fixed on the first syllable, in Polish on the one but last syllable. In languages with a free stress its place is not confined to a specific position in the word. In one word it may fall on the first syllable, in another on the second syllable, in the third word — on the last syllable, etc. The free placement of stress is exemplified in the English and Russian languages, e.g. English: 'appetite - be'ginning - ba'lloon; Russian: озеро - погода - молоко.

The word stress in English as well as in Russian is not only free but it may also be shifting, performing the semantic function of differentiating lexical units, parts of speech, grammatical forms. In English word stress is used as a means of word-building; in Russian it marks both word-building and word formation, e.g. 'contrast — con'trast; 'habit — habitual 'music — mu'sician; дома — дома; чудная — чудная, воды — воды.

There are actually as many degrees of stress in a word as there are syllables. The opinions of phoneticians differ as to how many degrees of stress are linguistically relevant in a word. The British linguists usually distinguish three degrees of stress in the word. A.C. Gimson, for example, shows the distribution of the degrees of stress in the word examination. The primary stress is the strongest, it is marked by number 1, the secondary stress is the second strongest marked by 2. All the other degrees are termed weak stress. Unstressed syllables are supposed to have weak stress. The American scholars B. Bloch and G. Trager find four contrastive degrees of word stress, namely: loud, reduced loud, medial and weak stresses. Other American linguists also distinguish four degrees of word stress but term them: primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary stress and weak stress. The difference between the secondary and tertiary stresses is very subtle and seems subjective. The criteria of their difference are very vague. The second pretonic syllables of such words as libe'ration, recog'nition are marked by secondary stress in BrE, in AmE they are said to have tertiary stress. In AmE tertiary stress also affects the suffixes -ory, -ary, -ony of nouns and the suffixes –ate, -ize, -y of verbs, which are considered unstressed in BrE, e.g. 'territory, 'ceremony, 'dictionary; 'demonstrate, 'organize, 'simplify.

British linguists do not always deny the existence of tertiary stress as a tendency to use a tertiary stress on a post-tonic syllable in RP is also traced.

Typology of accentual structures

(из лекций): Degrees of stress

1) primary (strong)

2) secondary (alw preceeds the primary stress: e*xami*nation);

3) tertiary (alw follow the primary stress: *terri*tory, *dictio*nary, *cere*mony);

4) weak (unstressed)

In Russian: 2 degrees of stress:

- primary

- unstress

The dictionary of accents marks some long words with 2 stresses.

The differences in the number of stresses → differences of the rhythm.

1) omission of the secondary stress (examination)

2) omission of the tertiary stress (dictionary)

3) degree of reduction of the pretonic vowel (in Rus this vowel is not reduced)

4) reduction of unstressed posttonic vowel in all E words without exceptions (*photogrа:ph)

Билет 13

The specific character of English prosodic basis as compared with Russian.

The range of the voice in English is much wider than in Russian.

Comparing English and Russian we pay attention to following characters:

English falling tone is steeper and reaches the bottom of the voice range. It sounds like an angry Russian tone of voice. Cf.: English ‘Do. Russian «Да». English rising tone is slow and starts as a level tone before it rises to the middle of the pitch range. In case of polysyllabic realization the stressed syllable remains on the bottom line while the unstressed syllables go up and reach the medium level. It sounds implicator even menacing to a Russian ear. Russian rise is more abrupt, and starts on a higher level. In a polysyllabic word the stressed syllable goes up while the unstressed syllables go down. Cf.:

RP gradually descending stepping head is composed of each stressed syllable going down a little with the unstressed syllables, ideally, keeping up or, actually, going slightly down. It is more natural for a Russian speaker to drop the unstressed syllables down to the bottom of the range right after the first stressed syllable or, in case of scandent series, let them drift up. All these pitch movements of the Russian unstressed syllables create the flavor of Russian speech unattainable by foreign learners. Cf.:

There are structural constraints on how many syllables are necessary for the realization of a single tone. The specific feature of English, as compared with other European languages, is the ability of English complex tones to be realized on a single syllable. Thus English is characterized by compression of pitch change within one vowel, for instance, which can be seen in the rise-fall-rise on a word No. It can sound playful and full of other connotations thanks to pitch modulation in one vowel only. This phenomenon is unparalleled in Italian, for instance. Italian needs at least two syllables to realize that tone.

Rhythm:The proportion of accented and unaccented syllables is:English (RP)1:2. RP speech is described as clipped, pointed contrastive in the length of accented and unaccented syllables.Russian- 1:3.

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