The specific character of English prosodic basis as compared with Russian.

 

 

Prosody is “a term used in suprasegmental phonetics and phonology to refer collectively to variations in pitch, loudness, tempoand rhythm”. (Crystal). Recently voice quality has been added to the list of prosodic features.

 

The range of the voice in English is much wider than in Russian.

Comparing English and Russian we pay attention to following characters:

English falling tone is steeper and reaches the bottom of the voice range. It sounds like an angry Russian tone of voice. Cf.: English ‘Do. Russian «Да».
English rising tone is slow and starts as a level tone before it rises to the middle of the pitch range. In case of polysyllabic realization the stressed syllable remains on the bottom line while the unstressed syllables go up and reach the medium level. It sounds implicator even menacing to a Russian ear. Russian rise is more abrupt, and starts on a higher level. In a polysyllabic word the stressed syllable goes up while the unstressed syllables go down. Cf.:

RP gradually descending stepping head is composed of each stressed syllable going down a little with the unstressed syllables, ideally, keeping up or, actually, going slightly down. It is more natural for a Russian speaker to drop the unstressed syllables down to the bottom of the range right after the first stressed syllable or, in case of scandent series, let them drift up. All these pitch movements of the Russian unstressed syllables create the flavor of Russian speech unattainable by foreign learners. Cf.:

There are structuralconstraints on how many syllables are necessary for the realization of a single tone. The specific feature of English, as compared with other European languages, is the ability of English complex tones to be realized on a single syllable. Thus English is characterized by compression of pitch change within one vowel, for instance, which can be seen in the rise-fall-rise on a word No. It can sound playful and full of other connotations thanks to pitch modulation in one vowel only. This phenomenon is unparalleled in Italian, for instance. Italian needs at least two syllables to realize that tone.

Rhythm:The proportion of accented and unaccented syllables is:English (RP)1:2. RP speech is described as clipped, pointed contrastive in the length of accented and unaccented syllables.Russian- 1:3.

 

PHONOLOGICAL AND NON-PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES IN THE SYSTEM OF ENGLISH VOWELS (11)

 

Substitution gives us a useful tool for establishing contrastive units, phonemes. The basic method of establishing a phoneme inventory is finding a minimal pair of words which form contrast in one segment only, like hot/cot. Similarly, in word sets like heed, hid, head, had, etc, any 2 words can form a minimal pair in which there’s contrast in respect of one vowel segment only.

There’re 20 vowel sounds which have a distinctive function in RP. Here are the words illustrating the contrasts established by replacing one vowel for the other (this will give us 17 phonemes):