Уровневые показатели начала и конца тона

CONTENT
Introduction 1
Part I Theoretical Preview of the Problem 3
1.1 Intonation and Prosody 3
1.2 Schools of Prosody 5
1.2.1 British Schools 5
1.2.2 American Schools 8
1.3 Prosodic features 9
1.3.1 Pitch 11
1.3.2 Brazil’s model of discourse intonation 11
1.3.3 Speech Volume and Tempo 14
Part II The Analysis of Intonation Patterns and Tone Groups 17
2.1 Intonation Pattern 17
2.2 Intonation pattern and its component 18
2.2.1 The nuclear tones 18
2.2.2 The pre-nuclear tones 19
2.3 The combinations of the tones 21
Conclusion 24
Bibliography 26

Introduction
The study of prosody is considered to be an area of knowledge, which has undergone the most noticeable changes during the last years. It can be explained by the fact that nowadays in linguistics and in particular, phonetics significant theoretical advances that have allowed a better understanding of the prosodic parameters functioning while expressing various types of values in the world languages have been achieved.
Prosody has been studied from numerous perspectives by scientists belonging to different linguistic schools. There exists a great diversity of approaches to prosody. Different approaches examine prosody from the point of view of grammar, discourse, pragmatics, phonetics and phonology.
Prosody can be regarded as a part of a language grammar. Discourse approaches examine the prosody of normal interactions rather than stylized, constructed, fluent, scripted interactions. Functional approaches integrate the study of prosody with the study of grammar and meaning in natural social interactions.
Pragmatics examines the distinction between the literal meaning of a sentence and the meaning intended by the speaker. Prosody can affect the changes of the meaning within a sentence by indicating a speaker's attitude to what is being said (e.g. it can indicate irony, sarcasm, etc.) particularly when prosody works in conjunction with the social/situational context of an utterance.
Prosody studies those aspects of speech that typically apply to a level above that of the individual phoneme and very often to sequences of words (in prosodic phrases). Features above the level of the phoneme (or "segment") are referred to as suprasegmentals. A phonetic study of prosody presupposes a study of the suprasegmental features of speech.
At the phonetic level, prosody is characterised by:-
vocal pitch (fundamental frequency)
loudness (acoustic intensity)
rhythm (phoneme and syllable duration)
Phonetic studies of prosody in most cases are concentrated on measuring the characteristics mentioned above.
The object of our term paper is prosody and intonation means in English.
The subject of the work is the prosodic characteristics which influence the beginning and the end of the tone.
The aim of the research is to study these specific features creating the pitch range and tempo within the flow of speech. To achieve the aim the following tasks were put forward:
1) to make a theoretical review of the notions “prosody” and “intonation”;
2) study the main characteristics of rhythmic and intonation system of English speech;
3) to analyze the intonation patterns and tone groups on the basis of their functioning in speech.
The following research methods were used while working on the problem:
- bibliographical;
- descriptive;
- analytical;
- comparative.
The work starts with the introduction revealing the preview of the problem studied in it and the main aspects of making the research. Two parts of the content are subdivided into units. The first part is a theoretical one; it deals with the concepts of prosody and intonation of English language. The second one is practical; it contains the analysis of the intonation patterns and tone groups. The work is ended with the conclusion. Finally, the bibliography is added.

Conclusion
In the research undergone a set of tasks has been done, some of them brought to light the concept of every prosodic means (rhythm, intonation, volume, tempo, pauses), considering rhythmic and intonational framing of English speech. As a result, we got to know that prosody plays an important role in teaching a language because in the study of English the particularly relevant tasks are the tasks forming a regular speech. Intonation is important as it is important for the meaning of an utterance. Intonation gives some sense to words and grammatical constructions. The same remark, uttered by different tones can be perceived as an order, a request, a statement or a question, spoken with various modal and emotional meanings. Proper use of voice tone is a sign of a speaker's phonetic literacy.
Having analyzed the rising and falling tone, we have decided that the first tone is the tone of uncertainty, incompleteness, and doubt. Therefore, rising intonation is mainly used in interrogative sentences, report a great interest or surprise, it's a polite tone. The falling tone is the tone of straight assertion, completeness, and certainty. So falling intonation is used in declarative sentences, special questions, exclamatory sentences, etc. In English speech intonation plays an important role both for framing speech and perception a text: it is a means of expressing meaning and emotional contents of an expression.
Pitch level (mid, high, low) and range (normal, wide, narrow) are essential features of intonation and tones. The voice does not jump up and down while pronouncing sentences, and the voice does not rise high or fall low without any reason.
Each tone has its own pitch levels on which it begins and ends, and each tone has its own range, that is, the span between the beginning of a tone and its end.