Stepping heads Stepping heads are characterized by an even, unchanging pitch-level over each of the stress-
groups.
Stress A syllable is stressed when it is made more noticeable or prominent than other syllables; this effect
is achieved if it is pronounced with one or more of the following features: greater length, greater
loudness, higher pitch or a pitch change. Uses of stress: (1) lexical stress, or word-stress; (2)
prominence, or ‘sentence/utterance stress’.
Stress-groups An utterance is split into groups of syllables unified by a stressed syllable, i.e. stress-groups, each
of which is a semantic unit – generally a word, often more than one word, because stress does not
fall on each word in an utterance, and occasionally it is less than a word, considering the possibility
of words with two stresses. Within a stress-group composed of one polysyllabic word the unstressed
syllables may join the stressed one as either proclitics (preceding it) or enclitics (following it).
Styles Varieties of language correlating with extralinguistic, i.e. social, situations are generally termed
styles. The distinctive features of styles include language features of various kinds, among which
phonetic modifications play the leading role in oral speech.
Suprasegmentals Suprasegmentals are features of speech stretching over more than one sound, or segment, up to
whole utterance (e.g. stress, rhythm, tempo, voice quality).
Supraphrasal unity (SPU) The view of a text as ‘built up’ by utterances – the minimal self-contained units of communication –
has been enriched in modern linguistics by introducing a ‘hierarchy’ of text constituents which
embraces a variety of ‘intermediate’ units lying between an unexpanded simple utterance and the
text.
The higher units are formed by grouping utterances into complexes, or sets, each occupying a
certain ‘slot’ in the semantic structure of the text, reflecting thereby the subdivision of the overall
topic into a number of subtopics. The unit coming next to an utterance in the above-mentioned
hierarchy is a supraphrasal unity (SPU). The individual phrases within a SPU have specific
language markers of a closer semantic relationship between them than between the initial phrase of
a SPU and the following utterance in the text, on the other. Because of this ‘marked’ semantic
closeness a supraphrasal is not unrestricted in its length, which does not typically exceed 4 or 5
component phrases.