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Functions of intonation

The principal functions of I. are:

    1. Communicative – the change in melody/tone leads to the change of the communicative type of the utterance. (command, request).

    2. Expressive (attitudinal). This functions consists in expressing the attitude of the speaker towards what is being spoken about. The ability of intonation to express attitudes is associated with tones and pitch range features accompanied by voice quality and tempo changes: John’s come. – John’s come!

There is a distinction between the attitude towards what the speaker is saying, and his/her emotional state. The emotional (physical and psychological) states are classified into strong and weak, positive and negative and they are universal, i.e. shared by all people. Then there are also conventional, culture-bound social norms which put constraints on the freedom of expression, on the ways of demonstrating emotions and attitudes. This makes it difficult for a foreign learner to interpret attitudinal intonation means.

    1. Culminative – difference between the new and the given info (theme – rheme): ex.: Harrington’s the THIRD one. – The THIRD one is Hurrington.

    2. Highlighting – singling out words according to the degree of their semantic importance.

    3. Semantic – the difference in the meaning of the whole sentence or just one word brought about by a change in the pitch pattern:

  1. She does not lend her books to anybody (with a low fall) (не дает книги никому)

  2. She does not lend her books to anybody (with a fall-rise) (не дает книги случайным людям)

    1. Discourse – look at sentence intonation patterns within larger contexts in which they occur. We speak in order to communicate, and we need to interact with our listeners to do this. We must indicate what type of information we are presenting and how it is structured, and at the same time we must keep our listeners’ attention and their participation in the exchange of information. Thus, practically all the separate functions traditionally attributed to intonation (см. перечисленные выше) could be seen as different aspects of discourse function.

The notions of fixed and free stress. Account for the position of stress in the following words: examination, colonization, brother, above, absent-minded, ex-president, barometer.

  1. Fixed stress – all the words have a stressed syllable in one and the same position in relation to the beginning or the end of the word. French- the main accent is tied to the last syllable of the word. Czech- the main accent falls on the initial syllable of each word and gram. form of a word(+Finnish, Estonian, Polish)

  2. Leng.with Free stress (E,R) – stress may occur on any syllable of the word.

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.

Eֽxaminátion- Rhythmical tendency (The rhythm of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables gave birth to the rhythmical tendency in the present-day English which caused the appearance of the secondary stress in the multisyllabic French borrowings)

ֽColonizátion- Rhythmical tendency (same).

Bróther- Recessive, Unrestricted

Above- Recessive, restricted

ábsent-mínded- Retentive- (a derivative retains the stress of the original words )

ex-président- Retentive (semantic factor- compound numerals and adj and words with meaningful prefixes have one stress.)

barómeter- Rhythmical tendency (majority of 3-4 syllabic words with one accent are stressed on the third syllable from the end, and thus stress is called rhythmical)

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