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involving alternating stressed and unstressed (prominent and non-prominent) words as well. As a
result, the ‘normal’ stressing of words in an utterance can be modified:
words entitled to become
prominent due to their content nature are ‘deprived’ of prominence in an utterance, if both the
immediately following and immediately preceding words are stressed. This phenomenon is known
as
the influence of rhythm on utterance-stress. At the same time, such modifications should not
interfere with the communicative meaning of an utterance;
in other words, the decisive factor for
utterance-stress is the semantic weight of a word in the given context.
Informal style
The informal style is used in personal every-day communication. This category embraces the most
frequent and the most widespread occurrences of spoken English. Most typically
informal speech
takes the form of a conversation, although monologue is not infrequent either.
Intonation
Effective communication depends to a significant degree on such features of speech as variations in
the
pitch,
loudness,
tempo and
timbre of the voice. These are prosodic, or non-segmental, features,
which form a complex unity of properties commonly referred to as
intonation. Intonation does not
only constitute a constant structural characteristic of an utterance but performs a number of
important communicative functions as well.
Intonation pattern
Each syllable in the speech chain has a special pitch colouring. Some of the syllables are
characterized by significant moves of tone up and down. Each syllable bears a definite amount of
loudness. Pitch movements are inseparably connected with variations of loudness. Together with
the tempo of speech they form
an intonation pattern which is the basic unit of intonation.
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