Pronouncing the Phoneme for a Foreign Speaker of English Research Paper

Pronouncing the Phoneme for a Foreign Speaker of English - Research Paper Example rotary (1983) describes four functions of intonation as he explains how speakers employ intonation to communicate effectively. The first is the attitudinal function of intonation, which allows people to convey their emotions through a particular tone. For instance, if one can assert Good luck in such a way as to convey genuine enthusiasm for someones prospects, or else utter the analogous words in a sarcastic way which betrays ones envy for that other person. Prosodic (loudness, speed, pitch range), sequential (pauses, tonic syllables), and paralinguistic (body language) components play a great part in this function. The accentual function of intonation serves to convey stressed syllables. Usually, tonic syllables are used to convey information. For example, in Im taking the children to the cinema, the tonic stress (Roach, p. 183) would be on the word cinema, since it provides information which the s peaker needs to stress. The grammatical function of intonation serves to destine the syntactic aspects of a language and to clarify certain ambiguities. One could ask, The exams tomorrow, isnt it? either by employing falling intonation in the pursue question (so that the speaker is merely asking for confirmation) or by employing a rising intonation, so that the speaker demonstrates doubt about the statement. The other function Roach describes is the discourse function, where intonation gives indications about the context of an utterance. Stress tends to be placed on words that convey unexpected information, for instance, He is actually studying.