Zhunussova G., AA 81

Linguistic communication, i.e. the use of language, is characteristically vocal and verbal behaviour, involving the use of discrete language elements. It is vocal because it is crucially associated with the articulatory (vocal) organs. It is verbal because words play a central part in it. Thirdly, it involves the use of discrete language elements, which differ from one another discretely (on an either-or basis) rather than gradually (on a more- or-less basis).

Words as lexical items are discrete because they differ from one another on an either-or basis.

Words are composed of basic sounds called phonemes. The latter are discrete, too, because two phoneme-realisations either represent the same phoneme or two different phonemes. The phonemes of a language are those sounds that are capable of distinguishing otherwise identical words. If you replace one phoneme with another in a particular word, you may get a different word which no longer means the same

When the only difference between two words is that one has one phoneme where the other has another phoneme, the two words constitute a minimal pair.

Phonemes can be looked upon as segmental elements, because they are in a sense the smallest building blocks (= segments) of words and sentences. But words and their sequences in sentences also contain suprasegmental elements, which are called so because they are “superimposed” upon units that are or can be larger than segments, such as e.g. syllables.

Stress is a degree of the prominence of a syllable. Stress patterns are patterns of syllabic prominence. Syllabic prominence can be achieved by various means. The innumerable degrees of syllabic prominence that are physically possible and may actually occur in real speech can be grouped into a few, discrete degrees in English: non-stress, tertiary stress, secondary stress, and primary stress (in order of increasing strength).

A tertiary-stressed syllable is louder than the unstressed ones, i.e. it is extra-loud. A secondary-stressed syllable is extra-loud and pitch prominent, it is associated with some pitch change, but this pitch change is not the initiation of a nuclear pitch pattern, only a step-up or step-down in pitch. By contrast, a primary-stressed syllable is extra- loud and pitch prominent in the sense that it initiates a nuclear pitch pattern. A nuclear pitch pattern is the characteristic final melody in an intonational phrase, e.g. a falling contour, a rising contour, a falling-rising contour, etc.

But they can also distinguish utterances, i.e. spoken sentences.

Pitch patterns (= tones) are permanent pitch configurations that are carried by syllables or syllable sequences. The commonest pitch patterns are the falling (i.e. high-low), rising (i.e. low-high), falling- rising (i.e. high-low-high), rising-falling (i.e. low-high- low), high level (i.e. high), and low level (i.e. low) tones. In some languages, such as e.g. Chinese or Thai, pitch patterns are used as lexical tones or “word melodies”, because they can distinguish the meanings of words that are segmentally identical. Such languages are called tone-languages.

In other languages, such as English or Hungarian, there are no word- melodies, but pitch patterns are used in intonation, i.e. as parts of “utterance melodies”, because they distinguish the meanings of utterances that are in other respects identical. Such languages are called intonational languages. Compare for example the English utterances (8a) and (8b), differing only in the final parts of their intonations, i.e. in the nuclear contours they have. Intonation can be transcribed (i.e. represented on paper) by means of tonetic stress marks, i.e. graphic symbols which simultaneously indicate stress and intonation.

By means of the tonetic stress marks we can transcribe the stressing and the intonation of utterances within the line of text and no separate drawings are necessary. Of course there is room for variation within the pitch patterns. For example, a fall can start at any pitch from very high to mid-low pitch. Nevertheless, a fall is a discrete pitch pattern, because it is not a rise, not a fall-rise, not a rise-fall, and not a level tone, either. Two tone-realisations realise either the same tone, or two different ones.