Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished: Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time. Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time. Dipping or Fall-rise Intonation falls and then rises. Peaking or Rise-fall Intonation rises and then falls.
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes–no questions.
These properties can be those of stress, intonation (a single pitch and rhythm contour), or tonal patterns. Prosodic units occur at a hierarchy of levels , from the syllable , the metrical foot and phonological word to the intonational unit (IU) and to a complete utterance . [ 1 ]
The rhythm of the English language has four different elements: stress, time, pause, and pitch. Furthermore, "When stress is the basis of the metric pattern, we have poetry; when pitch is the pattern basis, we have rhythmic prose" (Weeks 11). Stress retraction is a popular example of phrasal prosody in everyday life. For example:
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
Each English word has an associated stress pattern: [1] each syllable is stressed or unstressed. Unstressed syllables are generally lower in pitch, quieter, shorter, and typically also phonetically reduced, notably with the vowels nearer to schwa. Many languages mark syllable stress and its absence with some of these features, but rely on them ...
At 7.5 months English-learning infants have been shown to be able to segment words from speech that show a strong-weak (i.e., trochaic) stress pattern, which is the most common stress pattern in the English language, but they were not able to segment out words that follow a weak-strong pattern.
The pitch accents of English used in the ToBI prosodic transcription system are: H*, L*, L*+H, L+H*, and H+!H*. [7] Most theories of prosodic meaning in English claim that pitch accent placement is tied to the focus, or the most important part, of the phrase. Some theories of prosodic marking of focus are concerned only with nuclear pitch accents.