DIAPOSITIVA 1 - Intonation - Peter

Roach
What is Intonation?
According to Peter Roach, no definition is satisfactory, but if we try to provide a definition
we must recognize that the pitch of the voice plays the most important role.
When we speak normally the pitch of our voice is constantly changing but rarely we
realise, and one of the most important tasks is to analyse the speaker’s pitch
and recognize what it is doing.

How can we describe pitch ?

we describe it in terms of high and low,

Tone
We have a choice, to say words like (for example) “yes” or “no” with the pitch remaining at a
constant level, or with the pitch changing from one level to another. The word we’ll use for the
behaviour of the pitch in this case is “Tone“
For one syllable utterances we can use one of three possibilities: 
Level, Fall and Rise.
It will be necessary to use symbols to represent tones:

 
DIAPOSITIVA 2 -Stress

Normally, it is said that Stress, in phonetics, is the intensity given to

a syllable of speech  by special effort in utterance, resulting in
relative loudness.

Stress is a suprasegmental feature ( def. Suprasegmental, also called

prosodic feature, in phonetics, a speech feature such as stress, tone, or word
juncture that accompanies or is added over consonants and vowels;
these features are not limited to single sounds but often extend over
syllables, words, or phrases) of utterances. It applies not to individual
vowels and consonants, but to whole syllables. A stressed syllable is
pronounced with a greater amount of energy than an unstressed syllable and
is more prominent in the flow of speech.

Fernando Trujillo agrees that Stress, as a sound phenomenon, can be studied

from two points of view: production and perception. The production of
stressed syllables is said to imply a greater muscular energy than the
production of unstressed syllables. From the perceptive point of view,
stressed syllables are prominent. Prominence is the sum of different factors
such as loudness, length, pitch and quality.

Stress has several different functions in English.

1_ it can be used in sentences to give special emphasis to a word or to

contrast one word with another. As we have seen, even a word such as and
can be given a contrastive stress. The contrast can be implicit rather than
explicit. For example, if someone else says, or if you even thought that
someone else might possibly say (using stress marks within regular
orthography):
"John or "Mary should "go.
You might, without any prior context actually spoken, say:
"I think "John "and "Mary should "go.
2_ Another major function of stress in English is to indicate the syntactic
category of words. There are many noun–verb oppositions, such as

an "insult, to in"sult; an "overflow, to over"flow; an "increase, to in"crease.

In these three pairs of words, the noun has the stress on the first syllable and
the verb has it on the last. The placement of the stress indicates the syntactic
category of the word.

Diapositiva 3_ Rhythm
Rhythm is the sense of movement in speech, which is marked by the stress, timing and quantity of
syllables

Rhythm: ‘An application of the general sense of this term in phonology, to refer to the perceived
regularity of prominent units in speech. These regularities may be stated in terms of patterns of
stressed v. unstressed syllables, syllable length (long v. short) or pitch (high v. low), or some
combination of these variables.’ (Crystal 1985: 266-67)

According to, Rhythm could be defined as the periodic of an event. Languages can have one of
two different types of rhythm depending on the type of event that is repeated periodically.

Types of rhythm

SYLLABLE-TIMED languages are those in which syllables are repeated periodically, all syllables take
approximately the same amount of time; for example French and Spanish.

In stress-timed languages, it is stresses which occur at approximately equal intervals, that is, there
is more or less the same amount of time between stresses. English is a stressed-timed language
Diapositiva 4_ accent
Accent has two different senses:

Phonetic and Phonological Differences

Even though pronunciation differs, meanings of the same words often
remain the same, such as around North America or between Britain and
Australia. 

"Differences between accents are of two main

sorts: phonetic and phonological. When two accents differ from each other
only phonetically, we find the same set of phonemes in both accents, but
some or all of the phonemes are realised differently. There may also be
differences in stress and intonation, but not such as would cause a change
in meaning. As an example of phonetic differences at the segmental level, it
is said that Australian English has the same set of phonemes and phonemic
contrasts as BBC pronunciation, yet Australian pronunciation is so different
from that accent that it is easily recognized.
"Many accents of English also differ noticeably in intonations without the
difference being such as would cause a difference in meaning; some Welsh
accents, for example, have a tendency for unstressed syllables to be higher in
pitch than stressed syllables. Such a difference is, again, a phonetic one...
"Phonological differences are of various types...Within the area of segmental
phonology the most obvious type of difference is where one accent has a
different number of phonemes (and hence of phonemic contrasts) from
another."
(Peter Roach, "English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course," 4th
ed. 
Cambridge University Press, 2009)