UNMDP - DOII

Glossary of technical terms

 Tone: a given type of pitch movement.

 Tune: it is the complete pitch treatment of a word group.
 Stress: The relative degree of pulmonic force with which a word or syllable is uttered. The
perceived prominence of one syllable over another, this prominence is due to an interplay
of loudness, pitch and duration.
 Rhythm is the sense of movement in speech, which is marked by the stress, timing, and
quantity of syllables. Spoken English words with two or more syllables have different
stress and length patterns. Some syllables are stressed more than others and some syllables
are pronounced longer than others. When English is spoken, the speaker alternates
between stressed and unstressed syllables in regular intervals, with the stresses falling
within content words. This is called the Rhythm Rule. The stressed syllables of the
sentence create beats by saying the stressed syllable of that word for a longer period than
normal.
 Word group/tone unit/intonation phrase: (intonational phrase, intonation break,
intonation unit, intonation segment, breath group, tonality, chunk, intonation contour, tone
unit). The pitch pattern for an utterance. The functional unit, the shortest stretch of speech
that can advance any act of communication, is the tone unit. It is not only a phonological
constituent, but also a unit of information in the discourse. Spoken discourse takes the
format of a sequence of information units. An information unit is a unit of information. It
is the tension between what is already known or predictable and what is new or
unpredictable. It is the interplay of new and not new that generates information in the
linguistic sense. The Intonation structure reflects the grammatical structure. An Intonation
phrase usually corresponds to a syntactic (grammatical) boundary. We regularly place an
intonation break between successive sentences, clauses, phrases, and words. We can even
break within a word to place especial emphasis. An intonation phrase signals to the hearer
the syntactic structure of the sentence.
 Prominence: All these four factors together may render a syllable full prominence: pitch,
loudness, quality and quantity. If only one of these factors is present, then that syllable is
 considered (partially) prominent (e.g. the presence of a strong vowel). Then, a syllable
may not be stressed but still be prominent. But, all stressed syllables (they should contain a
strong vowel to support stress) are prominent. Principally, it is pitch change the most
salient factor that renders a syllable prominence. Prominent syllables need to be attended
to, both for their sounds and their significance as sense and meaning selectors.
 Pitch: the acoustic manifestation of intonation is fundamental frequency (F0) which is
perceived by listeners as pitch. The frequency of vibration of the vocal cords. The higher
the glottal fundamental frequency, the higher our impression of pitch. In speech, we
control the pitch of an utterance by changing the vibration rate of the vocal cords.
 Intonation: is the use of pitch in a phonetic phrase. Melody as a linguistic feature is called
intonation. The tone unit is the unit of intonation.
 Tonic syllable (kinetic stress, dynamic stress, nuclear stress, nuclear tone): It is the
syllable where the major pitch movement is observed/perceived. It is often the last
accented word (last lexical item) in a word group.