Parts of intonation pattern

English simple melody pattern is in such a sequence:

(Pre-Head) + (Head +) Nuclear Tone + (Tail).

The most important of these elements, always present in an intonation group, is the Nuclear Tone. It may be followed by one or more unstressed or partially stressed syllables called the Tail. The terminal tone may be preceded by a scale – a series of stressed and unstressed syllables that may be pitched variously starting with the first stressed syllable (the head of the scale). The head may be preceded by one or more unstressed syllables called the pre-head.

Although there are many pitch levels, it is convenient to distinguish 3 pitch levels of the human voice – high, mid and low. In highly emotional speech there may be two more pitch levels – extra-high and extra-low.

Methods of indicating intonation on the staves and in the lines of the text

Sentence stress

Words which provide most of the information are brought out in speech by means of sentence-stress. Thus sentence-stress is a special prominence given to one or more words according to their relative importance in a sentence.

The main function of sentence-stress is to single out the communicative centre of the sentence which introduces new information. the prominence is realized by variations of pitch, force, length and quality. The syllables of the words marked by sentence-stress are pronounced more distinctly.

Соколова p197

Types of sentence-stress:

1) Normal (syntactical) is used to arrange words into sentences or intonation groups phonetically. It expresses the general idea of the sentence and indicates its communicative centre.

We have plenty of TIME.

2) Logical stress is the type of sentence-stress which gives special prominence to a new element in a sentence or an intonational group.

I KNEW what he was going to say.

3) Emphatic stress increases the effort of expression. It may strengthen the stressed word making it still more prominent.