Functions of prosody

The prosody of the utterance performs a number of functions, the basic of which are constitutive, distinctive and identificatory.

1. The constitutive function is to form utterances as commu­nicative units. Prosody unifies words into utterances, thus giving the latter the final form without which they cannot exist. A succession of words arranged syntactically is not a communicative unit until a certain prosodic pattern is attached to it. E.G. "Pete has left for Leningrad" is not a communi­cative unit until it is pronounced , i.e. until it acquires a certain pitch—and— stress pattern. Prosody is the only language device that transform words as vocabulary items into comnunicative units — utterances. In written speech prosodic features are to some extent indicated by punctua­tion marks, e.g. "Fire!" is a command or an exclamation, depending on the situation in which it occurs, "Fire?" — a question, "Fire". - a. statement.

Prosody forms all communicative types of utterances — statements, questions, imperatives, exclamations and modal (attitudinal) types: — e.g. categoric statements, non-categoric, perfunctory statements, quizzical statements, certainty and uncertainty questions, insistent questions, etc. In constituting an utterance, prosody at the same time performs the segmentative and de limitative function. It segments connected discourse into utterances and intonation groups, and simultaneously delimits them one from another, showing relations between them. It also signals the semantic nucleus and other semantically important words of an ut­terance (or an intonation group). Prosody also constitutes phonetic styles of speech

2. The distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in several particular functions, depending on the meaning which is differentiated. These are communicative—distinctive, modal-distinctive, culminative ("theme— rheme") distinctive, syntactical — distinctive and stylistic—distinctive functions.

The communicative —distinctive function is to differen­tiate the communicative types of utterances, i.e. statements, questions, ex­clamations, imperatives, and communicative subtypes: within statements — statesments proper, answers, announcements, etc.; within questions — first instance questions, repeated questions, echo ques­tions; within imperatives — commands, requests and so on.

The modal-distinctive (attitudinal-distinctive) function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating modal meanings of utterances (such as certainty versus uncertainty, definiteness versus indefiniteness) and the speaker's attitudes (for instance, a reserved, dispassionate versus involved, interested attitude, or antagonistic versus friendly attitude and so on). Into this function some phoneticians include differentiation of the speaker's emo­tions, the emotional function.

The culminative — distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in differentiating the location of the semantic nucleus of utterances and other semantically important words. This function is often called logical, pre­dicative and accentual.

The adherents to the theory of "sentence perspective" claim that in this way prosody indicates the "theme-rheme" organization of an utterance, i.e. it distinguishes between what is already known and what is new in the utte­rance.

The syntactical—distinctive function of prosody is to dif­ferentiate syntactical types of sentences and syntactical relations in sentences.

Stylistic — distinctive function of prosody manifests itself in that prosody differentiates pronunciation (phonetic) styles, determined by extralinguistic factors.

3. The identificatory function of prosody is to provide a basis for the hearer's identification of the communicative and modal type of an ut­terance, its semantic and syntactical structure with the situation of the discourse.

All the functions of prosody are fulfilled simultaneously and cannot be separated one from another. They show that utterance prosody is linguistically significant and meaningful.