Лекция: Intonation

What is intonation? No definition is completely satisfactory, but we must agree that the pitch of the voice plays the most important part. There are no languages which are spoken as a monotone. Every language has melody in it; no language is spoken on the same musical note all the time. The voice goes up and down and the different notes of the voice combine to makes tunes. In some languages the tune mainly belongs to the word, being part of its shape, and if the tune of the word is wrong its shape is spoiled. The Chinese languages are like this and so are many others in south-east Asia, Africa and America. In these languages the same sounds said with different tunes may make quite different words: in Mandarin Chinese /mR/ said with a level tone means mother, but /mR/ with a rising tune means horse. Languages like this are called tone languages.

In many others languages, for example English, the tune belongs not to the word but to the word group. Tunes do not change the meaning of words in English, but nevertheless tunes play an important part. We can say a word group definitely or we can say it hesitantly, we can say it angrily or kindly, we can say it with interest or without interest, etc. Intonation has several functions:

· it enables us to express emotions and attitudes as we speak;

· it helps to draw listeners’ attention to the most important words which carry most of information;

· it helps to recognise the grammar and syntactic structure of a phrase.

Some people imagine that intonation is the same for all languages, but this is not true. Intonation of languages such as, for example, Italian or Hindu or Russian is different from that of English.

So, trying to sum up what has been said, we can give the following definition of intonation: intonation is a complex unity of speech melody, utterance stress, rhythm and tempo which enables the speaker to express his thoughts, emotions and attitude towards the contents of the utterance and the listener.