Intonation group The utterance may either be a single intonational unit or consist of two or more intonational units.
This intonational unit is called the intonation group. If considered not only from the purely
intonational point of view, but also from the semantic and grammatical points this unit is known as
the sense-group. An intonation group may be a whole utterance or a part of it. In either case it may
consist of a single word or a number of words.
An intonation group has the following characteristics: 1. It has at least one accented word carrying a
marked change in pitch (a rise, a fall, etc.). 2. It is pronounced at a certain rate and without any
pause within it. 3. It has some kind of voice quality.
Irregular Prehead Among the various ways in which the whole intonation-group can be made livelier and more
emotional is the so-called Irregular Prehead. This term is applied to any prehead which is
displaced in pitch from the normal position in the lower half or near the middle of the voice-range.
The displacement can be made both upward and downward – High Irregular and Low Irregular
Preheads, respectively, the former being much more typical of English speech.
The Irregular Prehead (High or Low) is never very long, it rarely contains more than two or three
syllables.
Isochrony (equality of time intervals) A typical feature of English pronunciation is that the stressed (prominent) syllables in an utterance
occur at approximately equal periods of time. When an utterance consists of stressed syllables only,
this peculiarity implies more or less the same length of each stressed syllable in an utterance. When
there are unstressed syllables between the stressed ones as well, it means equal time for each of the
stress-groups. It must be understood that this isochrony (equality of time intervals) is relative, not
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absolute: the actual physical duration of adjacent stress-groups in an utterance is but rarely equal;
however, on the level of perception stresses seem to occur more or less regularly.
