Govor, Vol. 16 No. 2, 1999.
Original scientific paper
THE FALL-RISE: A NEVV TONE IN THE SLOVENE SENTENCE INTONATION
Smiljana Komar
; Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana Slovcnia
Abstract
The traditional model of the Slovene sentence intonation, developed in the 60s on the analysis of the reading of written literary texts. distinguishes among three nuclear tones: the fali, the rise and the level. One of the most surprising finds of the contrastive Slovene- English analysis, for which a British discoursal approach to intonation and its meanings was used, is that in the spontaneous Slovene speech speakers also use the fall-rise tone as it is the case in British Eglish. It has been established that the use of the fall-rise tone is on the inerease mainly in TV news and sport broadcasts. The analysis of the actual realization of the fall-rise tone in an intonation unit has shown that the tone has three possible realizations:
- within one polysyllabic word,
- within one phrase,
- as a split fall-rise, i.e. the falling pari is realized at the beginning of the intonation unit, whereas the rising pcirt comes towards the end ofit.
Contrary to Received Pronunciation (RP), the realization o f the fall- rise on one polysyllabic word is very rare in Slovene and can be regarded as more of an exception than a rule. The other two realizations are much more frecpient and exhibit some typical patterns of occurrence. Analysing the communicative value of the fall-rise, we can conclude that when it is realized within a single phrase, then the falling part introduces new information and the rising part highlights something which is alreadv known to the speakers but is important for a complete transfer of the message. If the tone is not realized within a single phrase, then the rising part simply indicates (he syntactical and semantical non- finality, whereas the f alling part carries the main message.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
174291
URI
Publication date:
1.9.1999.
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