The semantic tendency

In words with separate meaningful prefixes: ex-minister, Vice-president, ultra-fashionable; in compounds with semantically equal parts which have 2 strong stresses:

adjectives — dark-green, hard-working;

numerals – twenty-one, forty-five;

phrasal verbs – think over, take off, get up;

in compound nouns with a single stress on the more semantically important 1st syllable:

horseshoe, Newcastle, birthday, hothouse.

10. The structure of the English Intonation Pattern.

The Intonation Pattern is the complex of changes in the voice pitch, loudness and tempo.

IP contains either a nucleus/ tonic syllable alone or other stressed/unstressed syllables preceding/following it. The boundaries of an IP may be marked by pauses. In oral speech, an IP actualizes a syntagm (a group of words, semantically & syntactically complete) into an intonation group – a single word, or a sequence of words, which forms an intonational unit, containing a tonic syllable. One of the functions of intonation groups is to bundle up the

stream of speech into information chunks.

I. the Pre-Head / предударное начало

(unstressed syllables before the 1st stressed syllable)

1) Low (before Low Rise or Low Level Head);

2) Rising (before Descending or High Level Heads);

3) High (intensifying the meaning of the Fall).

II. the Head / собственно шкала

( the stressed & unstressed syllables from the 1st stressed syllable up to the last stressed syllable,

excluding it ):

1) Descending (Falling,Stepping, Sliding, Scandent);

2) Ascending (Rising & Climbing);

3) Level (Low, Mid, High).

III. the Nucleus / the tonic syllable / ядро, ядерный тон

(the last stressed syllable which bears the attitudinal and emotional content)

1) simple: \Low Fall, \Mid Fall, \High Fall;

/Low Rise, /Mid Rise, /High Rise; >Mid Level Tone/Terrace;

2) compound: \/Fall-Rise, /\Rise-Fall, /\/Rise-Fall-Rise;

IV. the Tail / безакцентное завершение

( unstressed syllables that follow the Nucleus ).

The falling nuclear tones are followed by Low Level Tails;

The rising nuclear tones are followed by Rising Tails.

11. The rhythmic organization of English speech and verse.

Speech rhythm is the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

The basic rhythmic unit is a rhythmic group – a speech segment containing a stressed syllable with preceding or/and following unstressed syllables attached to it. Unstressed elements which cling to the following stressed one are called proclitics (articles + nouns). Unstressed elements which cling to the preceding stressed one are called enclitics (some pronouns to the end of a verb form). The ' sis ter ' says it’s not quite \ se rious.

[1 intonation group = 4 rhythmic groups]

The type of speech rhythm: for English is…

In English poetry the rhythmic units comprise:

syllable  foot  metre  a line  a stanza.

Foot is a certain fixed combination of syllables, each of which is either stressed or unstressed;

Metre is the pattern of feet in each line:

3=DIMETER, 3=TRIMETER, 4=TETRAMETER,

5=PENTAMETER, 6=HEXAMETER, 7=HEPTAMETER.

Stanza is a group of verse lines forming a section of a poem and sharing the same structure as other lines of the same poem.

12. Phonostylistics and the system of phonostyles of English speech.

is a branch of linguistic stylistics which studies the functioning of various phonetic means used in a particular speech situation andinfluenced by a number of extralinguistic factors. The basic unit is a phonostyle – a system of interrelated articulatory and prosodicmeans used in a social sphere and serving a definiteaim of communication. In English speech the starting point of phonostylisticdifferentiation is the aim of communication [ toinform=news bulletin,to persuade=political speech,to instruct=lecture, to amuse=jokes ] and its subject-matter.