18. Speech prosody. Its perceptible qualities and acoustic properties. Meanings of prosody

The functions and meanings of prosody should be described with reference to the utterance as the basic communicative unit. The prosody of an utterance (intonation) carries independent meanings of its own, regardless of the words and the grammatical structure of the utterance.

The prosody of the utterance is polysemantic. Due to its structural comp­lexity it can express a number of different meanings of interrogation, non-finality, uncertainty, non—categoric attitude, surprise, etc. The inherent meanings of prosody which are of a general character (such as definiteness — uncertainty, assertiveness — reservations, separateness — connectedness, etc.) are specified and concretized when interacting with the grammatical and lexical meanings of the utterance. There may be cases of correlation and harmony between the inherent meanings of prosody and the meanings of words and grammatical structures as well as disbalance and disharmony. For example, "lt may be/So" (But I'm not quite sure). The falling—rising tone is in harmony with the modal verb. Whereas in "It may be so" (I'm absolutely sure about it) the falling tone makes the statement sound categoric. Or agajn, the meanings of the prosodic structures in the utterances "I like that" and "Clever 'aren't you?" with the challenging or antagonistic Rise—Fall are opposite to the meaning of the words. Intonation gives greater precision and point to the meaning. It provides important information which is not contained in any of the other features of utterance. Hence the role of utterance prosody in communication.

.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.