THE CONNECTION BETWEEN TONE AND INTONATION IN VARIOUS APPROACHES

Intonation helps to determine meaning, gives clues about the attitude of the speaker, or how he feels about what he’s saying.

Intonation may be treated theoretically as a notion consisting of one central phonetic item (western scholars), or several intrinsically interrelated items. Western phoneticians consider intonation to be one thing.

According to American school of intonation, it is pitch, that is differences of pitches, which are used in languages to make differences of meaning. From the point of view of pure pitch it seems that a fall may vary continuously in its range. And the problem is to decide, whether this corresponds to a continuously varying semantic affect or to a limited number of clear differences of meaning. Pitch can be extra high, high, mid and low. The use of pitch to distinguish how utterances sound without interfering with the shape of the component words is known as intonation. It can be called a vertical approach to intonation. Within the speech of a person the contrasts of high versus low or fall versus rise or whatever they may be are significant.

e.g. (1) [`mmm] “I agree”

(2) [v mmm] “I agree, but…”

(3) [‚mmm] “What of it?”, «Ну и что?»

(4) [‘mmm] “Lovely! Delicious!”

(5) ['mmm] “Really?”

(6) ["mmm] “What do you mean?”

Differences stem from the difference in pitch. Features which are perceptibly different can be grouped separately because of difference of meaning.

According to the British school of phonetics, intonation is a contour, representing a tone group, that is a unit of intonation, consisting structurally of four basic parts and each of these parts contains its specific system of contrasts. It is a horizontal approach to intonation.

A contour contains the pre-head, the head, the nucleus and the tail. The last accented syllable of a contour is known as the nucleus. The stretch from the 1^st accented syllable up to the nucleus is called the head. Sometimes the term “head” is restricted to the1st accented syllable and the remainder is called the body. The head may be short or long. The syllables before the 1^st accented one are called the pre-head. The pre-head is not usually very long, but it may be so, when the1st accented syllable occurs late in the tone group. The syllables after the last accented syllable are called the tail. Neither head, nor pre-head may occur without the nucleus. On the other hand, the nucleus can occur without the head and the pre-head and both head and pre-head may occur independently of each other. For a head to occur there must be at least 2 accented syllables in the contour and for the pre-head to occur there must be at least 1 syllable before the1st accent.

The meaning of a contour may change with a new choice of nuclear tone and a new placement of the pre-head, head and the tail within the voice range.

According to the Russian school of phonetics, intonation is many things. It is a complex unity of several phonetic items; by intonation Russian phoneticians usually understand speech melody, pitch, stress, tone, loudness, rhythm, timber, prolongation, duration, tempo, range, etc. On the surface the approach often looks heterogeneous. Beneath the surface there are distinct interconnections.

According to the Russian school, intonation is many things +speech melody, which is represented by the contour which consists of tones => change or no change in pitch (level tone). Change from high to low, from low to high.

Thus we may say that Americans also study tone. Though they say they study pitch, actually intonation is differences in pitch. The use of pitch to distinguish the whole utterances without interfering with the shape of the components of the words is called intonation.

Pitch - extra high, high mid low

Differences in pitch stem from the rate of vibrations, thus the range of fall or rise may vary a lot.

Pitch changes creation tone which is very important to define the logical meaning and the emotional expression.

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