The Scopes of Experimental-phonetic Analysis

Abstract

The article investigates the nature of prosodic features of speech. The discussed problem has always been interested the linguists for many years. The prosodic features such as length, accent and stress, tone, intonation and others are analysesd in the article. The article states that from the beginning of the investigation of these features were based primarily on segments – vowels and consonants and prosodic features were either ignored or forced into an inappropriate segmental mould. The author explains the meaning of the term of ‘prosodic means’. She writes that ‘prosodic means’ is derived from the Greek ‘prosodia’ meaning a musical term which appears to signify something like ‘song sung to music’ or ‘sung accompaniment’. It implies that prosody is the musical accompaniment to the words themselves. Recently, the term covers such things as rhythmical patterns, rhyming schemes and verse structure. It is necessary to stress that in linguistic contexts it encounters with a different meaning such as characteristics of utterances as stress and intonation.