Prosodic settings of the English and Russian languages.

Before discussing language-specific differences between English and Russian intonation, we have to say that there are features shared by all lgs in the world, they are called universal. The 1^st simple universal truth is that all lgs (both tone and stress lgs) HAVE intonation. Other universal properties are:

-Intonation grouping (the division of speech into intonation groups)

-Nucleus placement (the most prominent word is normally placed at the end of the intonation group)

-Nuclear tones: a terminal fall in declaratives (38 out of 57 considered lgs - Dwight Bolinger, 1978 ) vs terminal rise in yes-no questions (36 out of 57 considered lgs - Dwight Bolinger, 1978), high fall in exclamations and imperatives, fall or fall-rise in Wh-questions.

-Declination (as a general rule, pitch is lower at the end of an intonation group than at the beginning)

-intonation of emotions (speakers of different lgs find no difficulty in identifying emotions when listening to foreigners)

-Key, or register (in different cultures key is used to signal social status, social role and regionality – Shevchencko 2003)

-Intonation acquisition: acquisition of intonation precedes the acquisition of the phonological

system as a whole. There are well established stages in the baby's intonation performance development. They are:

· 1-3 months — the first cries are demanding rise-falls;

· 3 months — 1 year — babbling period where level, wavy and rising into­nations of content are practised;

· 1 year 9 months — one-word period with the fall + rising intonations of deictics and requests;

· 1 year 9 months + 3 months — two-word period, high, mid and low registers differentiated.

The child's acquisition of basic pitch patterns for intonation produc­tion and perception is normally completed by the age of nine. Much literature has been written on the so-called "baby-talk" — the speech of adults to babies. There is considerable unanimity in the samples from different cultures: high pitch, lip rounding and palatalization are the most salient features.

However, every language is characterized by its own prosodic peculiarities, in other words every language has its own prosodic settings. Prosodic mistakes not only make speech sound foreign, but cause misunderstanding and thus failure of communication.

e.g. The conventional intonation pat­tern of Russian direct address, when used in the English setting, sounds like a peremptory command, which is rather rude:

—Annie!(with a high fall). Give it to me, please!

On the other hand, the American English direct address which was meant to be friendly sounds implicatory to a Russian ear, like a warning:

— Annie (with a low rise).

There are similar cases of thanks misinterpreted by foreigners: British English thanks pronounced by men sounded curt and lacking enthusiasm which in case of generous gift-giving was very impolite: — Thanks (with a low fall). The British, in their turn, comment on the Russian profuse thanks which they find very embarrassing (as if the Russians didn't expect to be given the favour!). As a result, there was a failure to create empathy by a friendly gesture of gift-giving though neither party actually meant to sound ungrateful.

It is understandable now why we have to follow the requirements of Council of Europe directions in speaking English:

• as listeners, to identify words and expressions used by native speakers of the (regionally coloured) standard variants of English (RR Polite Scottish, Irish, General American and Australian) and by non-native speakers whose speech, though also regionally coloured, approximates tothose norms;

• as speakers, to producespokenEnglishwhich is readilyintelligiblebothto native speakersandnon-native speakers who approximate to stan­dard norms.

A note is made that regional variants differ mainly in vowel colouring whereas the consonant system is relatively uniform and stable.

Let us now summarize the language-specific use of prosodic features in English and Russian, i.e. compare the prosodic settings of the two languages.

1. Firstly, though on average the pitch range applied by English speakers is close to the one of the Russian speech, the English pitch range includes lower pitch level as well. Indeed, the pitch level applied by an English speaker depends on their social status: the higher it is, the lower pitch level they use.

2. Secondly, Russians speak louder than the English and make fewer pauses, these pauses being longer though.

3. Thirdly, the languages differ in the forms of their basic tonic contours as well. For instance, the English falling tones are steeper and end on a lower pitch level than they do in Russian. On the other hand, the rising tones in the English language start on a lower pitch level and have a gentler slope than in Russian.

4. Finally, the typical scales of the Russian and English languages have their peculiarities, too. The basic English Stepping scale (emotionally neutral speech) is characterized by level tone movement in the stressed syllables and placing the following unstressed ones on the same pitch level as the stressed syllables.

By contrast, the corresponding emotionally neutral Russian scale is pronounced with a sharp tone rise in the stressed syllables followed by lowering the pitch level of the unstressed ones.