British analyses of English intonation

British descriptions of English intonation can be traced back to the 16th century.^[14] Early in the 20th century the dominant approach in the description of English and French intonation was based on a small number of basic "tunes" associated with intonation units: in a typical description, Tune 1 is falling, with final fall, while Tune 2 has a final rise.^[15] Phoneticians such as H.E. Palmer^[16] broke up the intonation of such units into smaller components, the most important of which was the nucleus, which corresponds to the main accented syllable of the intonation unit, usually in the last lexical word of the intonation unit. Each nucleus carries one of a small number of nuclear tones, usually including fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and possibly others. The nucleus may be preceded by a head containing stressed syllables preceding the nucleus, and a tailconsisting of syllables following the nucleus within the tone unit. Unstressed syllables preceding the head (if present) or nucleus (if there is no head) constitute a pre-head. This approach was further developed by Halliday ^[17] and by O'Connor and Arnold,^[18] though with considerable variation in terminology. This "Standard British" treatment of intonation in its present-day form is explained in detail by Wells ^[19] and in a simplified version by Roach.^[20] Halliday saw the functions of intonation as depending on choices in three main variables: Tonality (division of speech into intonation units), Tonicity (the placement of the tonic syllable or nucleus) and Tone (choice of nuclear tone);^[21] these terms (sometimes referred to as "the three T's") have been used more recently.^[19]

Research by Crystal^[22][23] emphasized the importance of making generalizations about intonation based on authentic, unscripted speech, and the roles played by prosodic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness and rhythmicality in communicative functions usually attributed to intonation.

The transcription of intonation in such approaches is normally incorporated into the line of text. A typical example would be:

We ˌlooked at the ↗sky | and ˈsaw the ↘clouds

in this example, the | mark indicates a division between intonation units.

An influential development in British studies of intonation has been Discourse Intonation, an offshoot of Discourse Analysis first put forward by David Brazil.^[24][25] This approach lays great emphasis on the communicative and informational use of intonation, pointing out its use for distinguishing between presenting new information and referring to old, shared information, as well as signalling the relative status of participants in a conversation (e.g teacher-pupil, or doctor-patient) and helping to regulate conversational turn-taking. The description of intonation in this approach owes much to Halliday. Intonation is analysed purely in terms of pitch movements and "key" and makes little reference to the other prosodic features usually thought to play a part in conversational interaction.

Word-compositionis a productive type of word-building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems. E.g.: campsite, bluebird, whitewash, in-laws, jumpsuit. Types of composition:

• Neutral

• Morphological

• Syntactic

NeutralTwo stems are joined together without any connecting elements (i.e. they are juxtaposed): scarecrow, goldfish, crybaby (плакса).

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1031