Suprasegmentals Flashcards
What are suprasegmentals?
- How you put sounds together.
- The way syllables, words and phrases are used.
- So a statement can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on how they are said.
- Stress, pitch/ intonation, loudness, rhythm= prosody
What is pitch?
How fast the vocal folds move.
What is a fundamental frequency?
People’s individual normal pitch.
What is the purpose of pitch alteration?
Converts emotion and intention. Pitch changes across an utterance.
What is intonation?
The music of speech. Tiny changes in the vocal folds.
What words do you use to describe pitch changes?
Rise, fall, level, rise-fall, fall-rise
What is nucleus tone?
Related to important information in an utterance. So important information is highlighted with the pitch changes.
What is the function of intonation?
- Sociolinguistic: accent differences.
- Pragmatic: change meaning of sentence (illocutionary role).
- Grammatical: indicate clauses
- Emotional: say something angrily or surprised.
How does length affect an utterance?
Creation of long or short sounds and syllable length is part of stress and affects rhythm.
What affects the loudness of syllables?
It is physically the amount of airflow being pushed from the lungs (initiation).
What is stress?
The overall prominence of a sentence.
What is stress composed of?
It involves extra loudness, pitch and length being given to syllables.
What is meant by the degrees of stress?
Primary and secondary- how stressed the vowel is.
Give an example of when stress changes the meaning of a word?
- Record (noun)- first vowel is stressed.
- Record (verb)- second vowel is stressed.
What tends to be stressed in a sentence?
- Words that we want to draw attention to.
- Only certain syllables.
- Words don’t keep the same stress pattern!!
