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This second edition provides extensive activities to help college-bound students develop clear speech and appropriate intonation. -- Vowels, consonants, stress, and intonation -- Recognition and production activities -- Paired communicative practice -- Sounds in isolation, sentences, dialogues, and rhymes
Directed to speakers of English as a second language, a multi-media guide to pronouncing American English uses a "pure-sound" approach to speaking to help imitate the fluid ways of American speech.
This is the second and concluding volume of the author's magnum opus on intonation, the summation of over forty years of investigation and reflection. The first volume, Intonation and Its Parts: Melody in Spoken English, was published in 1986. Intonation, or speech melody, refers to the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice in speech; it has intimate ties to facial expression and bodily gesture, and conveys, underneath it all, emotions and attitudes. Most of the first volume was devoted to explaining the basic nature, variety, and untility of intonation, using, as in the present volume, hundreds of examples from everyday English speech, presented much in the manner of musical notation. The present volume looks at how intonation varies among speakers and societies in terms of age, sex and region; how it interacts with grammar; and how it has been invoked to explain certain questions of logic. The discussion of variation shows the degree to which intonation can be conventionalized and yet embody a universal core of feelings and attitudes, renewed with each generation. The remainder of the book demonstrates that no explanation of those apparently more arbitrary phenomena with which intonation interacts is adequate if it ignores that emotive undercurrent. In examining recent proposals for a defining relationship between intonation and grammar or logic, the author shows that such relationships are inferential and based on attitudinal meanings. For example, a given intonation does not mean 'factuality', but rather 'speaker confidence', from which factuality is inferred. In general, the author shows intonation operating independently in its own sphere, but as nevertheless indispensable to interpreting other more arbitrary parts of language.
English sentence prosody provides cues to both focus structure and speaker attitude. Taking the phonological model of intonation developed by Pierrehumbert (1880 et seq.) as point of departure, this work illuminates the communicative function of English pitch contours by (1) giving a detailed survey of phrase-final contours found in statements and questions, and (2) investigating what attitudinal features determine choice of phrasal tones in these utterance types. This comprehensive study will be of interest to linguists in a number of fields, ranging from prosody to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
"It's not what she said, it's the way that she said it," is a complaint we have all heard (or made) some time or another. What does it refer to? It obviously relates to the various forms of wordless communication, but especially to the speaker's use of intonation—the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice—to convey sarcasm or resignation, anger or apprehension, or any of scores of other moods. In this summation of over forty years of investigation and reflection, the author analyzes the nature, variety and utility of intonation, using some 700 examples from everyday English speech. The work looks at both accent (pitch shift that points up individual words) and overall configurations (melodies that shape the meaning of whole sentences). It shows that most easily understood utterances employ one or another of a surprisingly small stock of basic melodies, and it shows both intonation and visible gesture to be parts of a larger complex that conveys grammatical as well as emotional information. Though it is one of the major divisions of the science of linguistics, intonation is of great interest to others outside of linguistics—to actors and lawyers who must use the voice to assert, to downplay, or to emote; to English teachers as an essential ingredient of idiomatic speech; to musicians for its many common elements in music theory; and to psychologists and anthropologists as a gauge of emotional tension and a clue to behavior.
British English Phonetic Transcription provides an accessible introduction to phonemic, phonetic and intonational transcription with a focus on British English. Featuring exercises, revision tasks and recordings to help students gain hands-on practice, the book takes a learning-by-doing approach and ensures students gain practice using each new symbol or concept introduced before moving on to the next. Consisting of three parts, the book covers: transcribing individual words, including consonants, vowels, primary stress, secondary stress, syllabic consonants and inflections; transcribing phrases and sentences, including liaison, weak forms, elision and assimilation; transcribing intonation, including the structure of English intonation and recognising pitch patterns. Ideally suited as a standalone workbook or for use alongside American English Phonetic Transcription, British English Phonetic Transcription is key reading for undergraduate students of linguistics as well as anyone teaching or learning English as a foreign language.