Intonation centre in English and Czech sentences
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 1995 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English 21 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | comparative study; intonation; word order; functional sentence perspective |
| Description | The paper is a study of the intonation centre (IC) based on an analysis of dialogues from O'Connor and Arnold's Intonation of colloquial English and their translation into Czech. In Czech, the IC usually occurs in final position, while in English, medial position is as frequent as final position. Prosodically 'light' endings of sentences are therefore relatively frequent in English, while Czech strongly prefers 'heavy' endings. In both languages, the IC most often occurs on nouns and verbs. IC-carrying verbs in Czech are lexical verbs, while English also accentuates auxiliary and modal verbs. Both English and Czech display a strong tendency to accentuate semantically prominent and context independent elements. Accentuating semantically weak and contextually tied elements is more frequent in English than in Czech. English employs intonation as a means of expressing emotiveness to a greater extent than Czech, where emotiveness is often expressed by lexical means (e.g. modal particles). |
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