Intonation as a text - organizing means

English intonation is a pretty complicated and varied phenomenon. There are dialectal and regional differences in intonation, for example, there is a noticeable difference between British and American intonation. Intonation may sound differently depending on whether the speakers have high or low voices, speak fast or slowly, loudly or quietly, energetically, emotionally, neutrally or listlessly. Men and women may have their own differences and preferences in intonation. For the purpose of studying, this variety may be described in several intonation patterns that are characteristic of English speech. Intonation is the music of the language. In English, we use tone to signal emotion, questioning, and parts of the sentence among many other things. It's important to recognize the meaning behind the tones used in everyday speech, and to be able to use them so that there are no misunderstandings between the speaker and the listener. It is generally true that mistakes in pronunciation of sounds can be overlooked, but mistakes in intonation make a lasting impression.general, linguists distinguish several main types of English intonation, where falling intonation and rising intonation are the two basic types. The fall-rise pattern has the meaning of both, i. e. both closed and open meaning. This signifies both definiteness and indefiniteness simultaneously, in the sense that a referent is instantiated but the utterance is not yet completed or in the sense that the speaker feels some hesitancy, reservation, doubt or uncertainty. The rise-fall pattern incorporates the fall of completion or assurance of the first pattern with the emotional overtone of a high pitch in the middle of the utterance. This is a so-called swell tone used for emphatic meaning: as the tone swells, the meaning or emphasis increases. Other main types of intonation include high fall, low fall, fall-rise, high rise, midlevel rise, low rise. They are variations of the two basic types of intonation. Language learners should master the typical patterns of standard falling and rising intonation before studying their variations.

Pitch is an important component of accentuation, or prominence, both at the level of individual words and at the level of longer utterances. Pitch is the degree of height of our voice in speech. Normal speaking pitch is at midlevel. Intonation is formed by certain pitch changes, characteristic of a given language, for example, falling intonation is formed by pitch changes from high to low, and rising intonation is formed by pitch changes from low to high. The pitch of the voice is determined by the frequency with which the vocal cords vibrate., The frequency of vibration of the vocal cords is in turn determined by their thickness their length and their tension. The modal pitch of the voice, i. e. one's natural average pitch level, depends on the size of the vocal cords. In general, men have thicker and longer vocal cords than women and children do. As a result, the modal pitch of a man's voice is generally lower than that of a woman or a child. In addition to its modal pitch, every individual voice has a pitch range which can be achieved by adjustments of the vocal cords. [14, 26] By tightening the vocal cords, a person can raise the pitch of the voice (vocal pitch); by loosening them, one can lower vocal pitch. There is also a natural variation in pitch associated with the amount of air that is expended during speech. When the airflow through the glottis is great, it causes the vocal cords to vibrate quickly.

Sentence stress makes the utterance understandable to the listener by making the important words in the sentence stressed, clear and higher in pitch and by shortening and obscuring the unstressed words. Sentence stress provides rhythm in connected speech. All words have their own stress in isolation, but when they are connected into a sentence, important changes take place: content words are stressed and function words aren’t; thought groups (i. e. logically connected groups of words) are singled out by pauses and intonation; the stressed syllables occur at regular intervals and are usually higher in pitch than the unstressed syllables; the unstressed syllables are blended into a stream of sounds between the stressed syllables; emphatic stress may be used in the sentence to single out the most important word; the last stressed word in the sentence gets the strongest stress with the help of falling or rising intonation. Developing the ability to hear, understand and reproduce sentence stress is the main prerequisite to mastering English intonation. Rhythm (from Greek <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language> ῥυθμός - rhythmos, "any measured flow or movement, symmetry") is the variation of the length and accentuation of a series of sounds or other events. The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_(music)> in speech <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_communication> is called prosody <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_(linguistics)>; it is a topic in linguistics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics>. Narmour describes three categories of prosodic rules which create rhythmic successions which are additive (same duration repeated), cumulative (short-long), or countercumulative (long-short). Cumulation is associated with closure or relaxation, countercumulation with openness or tension, while additive rhythms are open-ended and repetitive. Richard Middleton points out this method cannot account for syncopation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncopation> and suggests the concept of transformation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(music)>. A rhythmic unit <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmic_unit> is a durational pattern <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durational_pattern> which occupies a period of time equivalent to a pulse <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_(music)> or pulses on an underlying metric level <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_level>, as opposed to a rhythmic gesture <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmic_gesture> which does not. [15,78] (see Appendix 2)