Unit 5: Intonation
Fall-rise tone, its usage and peculiarities
Fall-rise tone, its usage and peculiarities
Type of the lesson: class on the practical phonetics.
Age of students: 1st year students.
Goals of the class: To develop phonetic skills of the students in recognizing the fall-rise tone.
I. Theory
Basically,
if we are talking about something we think the listener already knows about or
has experience of then we use fall-rise – known as referring tone. If we think
it is new for the listener we fall – known as the proclaiming tone. Look at the following utterances:
If we can't go on ↓↑
Saturday, why don't we go on
↓
Sunday?
Well, on
↓↑ Sunday,
↓
I'm supposed to be visting Ben.
In 'If
we can't go on Saturday' the tonic syllable is on 'Saturday ' & takes a
fall-rise pattern as it is part of the weekend plan conversation already
underway. The
second part of the utterance 'why don't we go on Sunday?', the tonic syllable
is in 'Sunday' with the proclaiming tone, a fall, as it is introducing a new
idea.
And in
the second utterance, the first part, ‘Well, on Sunday' has the fall-rise on
Sunday as it is shared, & the fall, the new information in the second part,
'I'm supposed to be visting Ben' is on 'Ben'.
While
fall and rise tones can be used in independent, single intonation units,
fall-rise tone appears to be generally used in what may be called 'dependent'
intonation units such as those involving sentential adverbs, subordinate
clauses, compound sentences, and so on. Fall-rise signals dependency,
continuity, and non-finality. Look at
the following examples:
Private ↓↑
enterPRISE / is always ↓ efFIcient.
A quick tour of the
↓↑
CIty / would be
↓ NICE.
It
generally occurs in sentence non-final intonation units. When the sentence "I can't eat anything" is
said in the falling tone, it is equal in meaning to "I can eat
nothing". But if the word anything is said in the fall-rise tone, the
sentence implies that "there are particular things that I can eat".
One of
the most frequent complex clause types in English is one that has dependent
(adverbial or subordinate) clause followed by an independent (main) clause.
When such a clause has two intonation units, the first, non-final, normally has
a fall-rise while the second, final, has falling tone. Therefore, the tone
observed in non-final intonation units can be said to have a 'dependency' tone,
which is fall-rise.
Typically,
the tone pattern Fall-rise + Low Rise involves a dependent clause followed by a
Yes/No question.
If I ↓↑
HELPED you / would you try
↓ aGAIN?
Despite its
↓↑ DRAWbacks / do you favor it or
↓ NOT?
II. Listening
Listen to the recording and identify where fall and fall-rise are used.
http://prostopleer.com/tracks/5230045cfCB
1) A: My cousin's
coming to STAY / in April.
// I'd like you to meet him.
A: Paris is lovely
in May and June.
B: I'm going to FRANCE
/ in April.
2) A: I always meet
John when I go to the swimming-pool. He must go there every day, I think.
B: He's taking up SWIMMing
/ to keep fit.
A: I don't know how
Alan is going to keep in shape working such long hours in the office.
B: He's taking up SWIMMing
/ to keep fit.
3) A: I think I
should write to the managing director. But I don't know where to send the
letter.
B: The firm's head OFFice
/ is in London.
A: I complained to
the shop in the High Street, but the letter I got in reply came from London.
B: The firm's head OFFice
/ is in London.
4) A: His exams
results were good. What did he do when he got them?
B: He applied for
uniVERsity / when he knew he had
passed.
A: So, he's hoping
to go to university. Has he applied yet?
B: He applied for
uniVERsity / when he knew he had
passed.
You can also read more about the fall-rise tone here:
http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Celik-Intonation.html
III. Hometask
1. Read pp. 185-188 in "Практическая фонетика английского языка" by M. Sokolova.
2. Write down the dialog from the recordings 4.3.1 and 5.1.1 and make an intonogram of the whole dialog. You may find the recordings here: 4.3.1, 5.1.1 .
