VIEWS OF FOREIGN EXPERTS ON THE PROBLEM OF INTONATION

ABSTRACT

The article is devoted to the main views of foreign scientists on the problems of intonation of the 19-21 centuries, their main works and contribution to the development of phonetics and components of intonation.

Keywords: intonation, prosody, tonogram, intonology, syllable, melody, speech

Phonetics, as a separate subject, has been studied relatively recently. Of course, scientists from time to time have investigated individual issues in this area of linguistics. Gradually enriching with research, scientific discoveries, practical knowledge and theoretical foundations, phonetics has become an independent and very interesting part of linguistics. The main tasks of the history of language is the analysis of evolutionary changes in all linguistic phenomena over the centuries. The history of the language explores the internal laws that govern the development of all components of the language: grammatical structure, vocabulary, spelling features, phonetic system (sound material of the language). So, intonation is a combination of prosodic characteristics of a sentence: tone (speech melody), volume, tempo of speech and its individual segments, rhythm, phonation features. Together with the stress forms the prosodic system of the language. Intonation is still the least studied part of linguistics. Linguists have adopted phonetics as a separate part of grammar since the second half of the 19th century. A comprehensive study of intonation linguists began in the second half of the twentieth century.

At the same time, scientists note a close dialectic relationship between prosody and intonation. So, in its most general form, speech intonation is defined as “a set of system-determined prosodic characteristics of speech, which include the frequency of the fundamental tone, intensity and duration, which in terms of perception corresponds to the melodic, power (volume) and temporal components”.

There is also a point of view according to which the term ‘intonation’ is equivalent to a change in the direction of the tone of the speaker’s voice, and other characteristics of speech, such as volume, tempo, change in voice quality, refer to “paralinguistic” phenomena and are considered separately from intonation.

The author of unique ideas that have not lost their relevance to this day, J. Zh. Rousseau believed that prosody is the main distinguishing feature of languages. Work on the rhythmicity of languages appeared ​​ (G. Sweet, Peerson, J. Zh. Russo). By this time, linguists have already distinguished five voice levels. Since the end of the XIX century, scientists began to study the individual characteristics of speech, to study the influence of physical data on the quality of speech. The authors of the current intonation system were D. Jones and G. Klinghardt. Recognizing the four basic tones, G. Sweet proposed his own version of the structural division of intonation. In the 90s, linguists drew lines and arcs for intoning speech and indicated the timbre of the voice using purely musical signs, such as treble and bass clefs. A big minus in the system was the absence of signs for each syllable. They indicated only words.

It is worth noting that at the beginning of the twentieth century, linguists already noted each syllable in the tonogram and distinguished two main tones. The structural division of intonation, defined by G. E. Palmer at the beginning of the twentieth century, still remains unchanged. The work of L.I. Armstrong and I.S. Ward turned out to be very significant for the development of intonology. Scientists conducted a scientific analysis of English intonation. This system also had didactic significance. L.I. Armstrong and I. Ward attached greater importance to the melody of speech and believed that stress was present after a certain time interval. Due to the contrasts in their system, D. Crystal believed that it is one step behind the system of G.E. Palmer.

After the 30s of the twentieth century, linguists began to study intonation in more depth - the acoustic characteristics of sounds and the emotional coloring of speech were studied. This was due to the development of society and international relations, and then the boundaries of research expanded. The intonation could not only be heard, but also seen. Intonation is actively studied by both linguists and psychologists, physiologists, doctors, physicists, and musicians. Despite the increased interest of linguists, by the end of the sixties of the twentieth century, the emotional side of speech was studied more than its prosodic features. Thus, in D. Crystal, there were many white spots in the study of intonation - the problem of the semantics of intonation, the lack of theoretical foundations, marking the level of voice in the tonogram, confusion in terms and other problems. The scientist believed that speech should be studied both from the physical and physiological sides.

The end of the twentieth century can be considered the beginning of the second stage of the development of intonology, since linguists study the aspects of speech and the features of different languages and dialects of the peoples of the world. Dialects of languages differ not only in lexical composition, but also in intonational patterns. The main features of British English intonation that distinguish it from both American English and other European languages are the prevalence of descending-ascending and ascending-descending tones. D. Shivnani investigated the rhythmic organization of the Indian version of the English language and came to the conclusion that this version of English is distinguished by equalizing the duration of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Interest in tonal languages is growing. N. S. T. Chang writes that the Mandarin language has many dialects and each of them has its own melody. The phonetist examined his native dialect Chengtu, for the presence of variations in intonation. N. S. T. Chang discovered that in this dialect, tonality influences the intonation of Chinese themes, the tonality of each syllable has a greater influence on the meaning of a sentence than changes in melody. The researcher divides the voice level into 5 steps.

At the end of the twentieth century, research aimed at the study of languages and speech, found a new direction. Back in the 70s, D. Crystal wrote about problems in intonology. In the 80s, D. Braisil proposed a new theory, which he called Discourse Intonation - speech intonation and proposed a new approach to the study of speech intonation, introduced new terms. A scientist studies real speech in a real environment with real interlocutors. The linguist believes that in the study of speech should distinguish between book and real speech.

Moreover, a number of foreign researchers claim that there is a clear similarity between prosodic phenomena and paralinguistic features. At the same time, paralinguistic phenomena are defined as non-linguistic, non-verbal means (voice and non-voice) that are used in the conversation. Since there is no clearly defined boundary between paralinguistic properties and prosodic phenomena, the tone of voice can be expressed both by prosodic means, such as intonation, and by paralinguistic ones, such as voice quality. In fact, both pitch and voice quality can perform both linguistic and non-linguistic functions.

As for D. Kristal, he is inclined to distinguish between prosodic and paralinguistic phenomena. He refers to the former the direction of the pitch, the range of the pitch, pause, volume, tempo and rhythm, while the term ‘tension’ corresponds to prosodic and paralinguistic categories.

The lack of a clear distinction between the concepts of prosody and intonation was caused mainly by objective reasons and, first of all, by the undeveloped foundations of the methodology, which did not allow us to describe the prosodic level of the language as a system level. Meanwhile, scientists “have long noticed the existence of an internal system over an objective system of sounds”.

So, intonation is a rather complex, multifaceted and extremely important phenomenon in the general context of human speech activity. It is intonation that actually organizes oral speech in general, including reading. With the help of intonation, the sentences are given the meaning of a question, motivation, request, message.

References:

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2. Sokolova, M. A. Theoretical phonetics of the English language. Moscow: VLADOS, 2016. Pp. 136, 192.
3. Fox, Anthony. Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2010. P. 10.
4. Ladd, D. Robert (2008). Intonational Phonology (second ed.). Cambridge University Press.
5. https://studfile.net/preview/7075211/ [electronic resource] (date accessed: 22.12.2019)