PHONETICS & PHONOLOGY

Chapter 8: Intonation
 Sentence-stress
• The greater prominence with which one or
more words in a sentence are pronounced as
compared with the other words of the same
sentence.
• 4 factors: loudness, length, pitch, quality

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 Levels of sentence-stress

E.g. He will come in a day.

vHe, will, in, a: unstressed

vCome: secondary stress
vDay: primary / main stress

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 Types of main sentence-stress
• Unmarked tonic stress
• Emphatic stress
• Contrastive stress
• New information stress

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 Unmarked tonic stress
• Found in content word in utterance final
position.

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 Emphatic stress
• To assign an emphasis to a content word,
which is usually a modal auxiliary, an
intensifier, an adverb, etc.

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 Contrastive stress
• Any lexical item can receive the tonic stress.
=> Highlight any word we please by means of
contrastive stress.

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 New information stress
• The information in a response to a wh-question
is stressed.

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 Rhythm
• The tendency to pronounce stressed syllables
in a sentence at more or less equal intervals of
time is called rhythm.
e.g. 'Walk 'down the 'path to the 'end of the
ca'nal.

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 Intonation
• Intonation – the unity of speech melody,
sentence stress, speech tempo and voice
quality which enables the speaker to
adequately communicate in speech his
thoughts, will, emotions and attitudes towards
reality and the contents of the utterance.
• Speech melody – variations in the pitch of the
voice.

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• Speech tempo – the speed with which
sentences or their parts are pronounced.
• Voice quality – a special colouring of the voice
in pronouncing sentences which is
superimposed on speech melody and shows
the speaker’s emotions.

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 Basic intonation patterns
• Fall – finaility & definiteness
• Rise – something more is to follow
• Fall-rise – politeness, apology, concern,
uncertainty, and disagreement
• Rise-fall – pleasant and unpleasant attitudes
• Level – a feeling of saying something routine
or boring, hesitation and uncertainty ->
reciting poems
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 Practice

• DO Chapter 8 Exercises / pp. 154-156

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