Intonation in English

Introduction

I have chosen the theme “Intonation” because it is one of the most interesting things of the speech and it is very important to acquire the proper intonation.

The aim of my speech is to tell what the speech melody is and how is it connected with sentence stress and how they influence each other.

Intonation is magic. It can say more than even words. Intonation can tell you about the mood and the character of the person. Each person has his own intonation. That is why already at the first meeting you can understand what kind of person is standing in front of you.

In order to feel the speaker’s mood you do not have to know the language a person speaks and it is even not obligatory to see their face – intonation of the speech will help to understand whether the speaker is angry or gentle.

Each person has his own intonation. Already during the first seconds when meeting a person we can say what kind of person he is judging by his intonation. The aim of this paper is to show how different types of tones can change the mood and the attitude of the speaker to the message.

Intonation

Intonation is one of the most, if not the most imporatant factor in communication. We know that we don’t have to understand all the different words in the sentence so that we could understand the whole meanig. The context helps us to understand the word we don’t have in our individual vocabulary. If this happens we will still understand the whole meaning of the sentence. But that’s where intonation comes in. It plays a great role in understanding things. Communication contains not only information about that what it is said, but also the attidute of the speaker and the message they are trying to send.

For example, when we lower our voice at the end of the sentence, we can say that we are doing it in order to show that we are finishing the sentence. When we speak more gentle or more rude, we want to show our emotional attitude to the listener according to the meaning of the expression.

Reasearchers have proven that the emotional forms of the expressions are common for all the people. Despite that the intonation of the languages is different. When we are listening to the foreing speech (even if we have perfect knowledge of this language) we lose some of the most important parts or the sense of the message. It is because intonation of our mother language and intonation of the foreigner is different. It is known that sometimes it is hard to get the meaning of the joke, which in most cases we get with the help of intonation. It is aslo the fact that intonation is the thing which the foreigners cannot get so easy. People pronouncing perfectly some words in foreing language can miss the right intonation when they pronounce long sentences. That is why we can say that intonation is a characteristic phonetic sign of the language.

Intonation perfoms its function not only in oral, but also in written language.

The proof of intonation being implicitly present in a written sentence is provided by the use of the punctuation marks. They provide enough prompts for the reader to intone written sentences mentally or aloud in such a way as to understand or cause others to understsand not only all the thoughts, but also many of the emotions and attitudes expressed in them.

There are a lot of ideas about what intonation is and what the definition of the intonation is. One of the definitions of the intonation was given by foriegn linguists D. Jones and J.O’Conner: “intonation- is the variations of the pitch of the voice.”

Speaking about the aim of intonation we can speak about its functions. There has been an expressive function pointed out which can help us to identify the personality of the speaker and his membership to one or another social group. It is impossible to speak about these functions as one.

Some say that there are three functions of intonation: delimitating, integrating and semantic. Others single out the following functions of intonation which they find to be the most important: communicative, distinctive, expressive, appelative, aesthetic. As it can be seen there are some differences in naming the linguistic functions of intonation. Still the main function of the intonation is to give emotional attitude from the speaker to the listener. When someone says that the sentence was said without any intonation that means that this sentence was said with a monotonous intonation or that intonation was not expressive enough.

There is a widely spread idea that intonation is subjective and that every person has his own intonation. It is a fact that different readers read one and the same text differently and this may be worth some attention. It is