entonation and meaning

when we talk with persons can see in us

• mood

• attitud

also when we say something the entonation help us to give at that words the correct mening and the other person can understand the message but the entonation is not the only tool to understand the meanig, the body language is another tool that help and this 2 elements together are know as paralanguage.
for example if we say

• would you please sit down ( angry)
• would you please sit down ( friendly)

with the correct entonation and body language the persons who receive the order is going to receive the correct mening and that person is going to react in base of that.

here there are some website where you can look more information.

http://www.americanaccent.com/intonation.html
http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic4757.html in this page there are a n explanation of a native speaker.

by Maria Paula

who I am?

Hi teacher, I hadn't read the comment where you ask who I am, well I'm Lidia and Zisko is Ramses, sorry but we already had a count with those nicknames, see you .

Diphthongs

The word diphthong is from Greek: it means "two vowels", and we write them as two vowels. A diphthong is a vowel in which the speaker's tongue changes position while it is being pronounced, so that the vowel sounds like a combination of two other vowels. These are tense vowels, they can be long or short.

Diphthong examples:

/eɪ/ as day, pay, say, lay.

/aɪ/ as sky, buy, cry, tie.

/ɔɪ/ as toy, boy.

/ɪə/ as beer, hear.

/eə/ as bear, pair, hair

/ʊə/ as tour, poor.

/əʊ/ as phone, no, go

/aʊ/ as how, cow

The three major diphthongs in Standard English, which are known as phonemic diphthongs, are aɪ (past rode; past p ridden), aʊ, and ɔɪ . All three of these diphthongs are very common, and many people simply think of them as single vowels in some contexts. For example, in the English word ride, the i would be transcribed phonetically as aɪ. Although it appears as a single letter in our writing, it actually consists of two vowels — if you say the word you should be able to hear the two. Similarly, the word how contains the diphthong aʊ at the end, and the word boy contains the diphthong ɔɪ.

English diphthongs chart:

http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/esl0105.html

INTONATION

INTONATION

Intonation is a crucial element or verbal interaction. Authors of teacher’s handbooks and teaching materials agree on this. The communicative importance of intonation should also be reflected in the attention it gets in language teaching.

There are different ways in which human sound is processed. The idea to emphasis is that all this is done in order to communicate.
Intonation is often defined as a speech melody, consisting of different tones, obviously, what melody and intonation have in common is that in both we make our voice go up or down at will. It means, the tones depend on the pitch of the voice.

There are seven or eight tones but the more commons in English are the follow combinations:”down – up”= falling rising tone and “up – down “= rising – falling.

FALL

RISE

RISE – FALL

FALL – RISE

LEVEL ___

The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, northeastern American English, like very many languages, have a rising intonation for each declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh-questions (Where did he find it?) and statement (He found it on the street.) Yes or no question (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always, For example.

He: ready?

She: No.

He: Why?

She: Problems.

He: Problems?

She: Yes.

He: What?

She: Babysitter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)
http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/azapata/materias/phonetics_1/intonation_exercises.pd
BY Ivan and Liliana

WHAT IS PARALANGUAGE? KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC

In a previous class, we learnt about paralanguage and intonation, both interesting and entertaining topics. As we saw, there are other ways how we can communicate with others, that means, we do not just use our speech, but we also express feelings, opinions, mandates, etc. through the body language, expressions and gestures, vulume, tone of voice, and in some cases intonation of speech, which are includes in paralanguage.

clarifying all kind of doubts, I am going to give you a definition of paralanguage. It is supposed that paralanguage is not about what something is said but how something is said. According to some authors, paralanguage refers to the nonverbal parts of communication, used to express or modify meaning and convey or share emotions. It also could be conveyed consciously ( for example when you have to communicate something with a purpose) or unconsciously. (just because, or in an spontateous way)

Remember that we listened in the recorging the word yes ten times in different ways. The main purpose of that activity was we realized that throught the intonation of words we can transmit a meaning, and this meaning is the feeling. in the word yes people in the recorging express feeling such as happiness, confidence, annoyance, and others.

I already have said that paralanguage involves lots of elements, one of them is body language, which involves feelings and physical expressions such as body pose, gestures, eye contact, etc. Sometimes the use of body language is an interpersonal way to communicate. In a classroom body language can be useful and helpful for both a better interaction between teacher and students and understanding of words. With imperative forms or in questions we can use a lot body language. for example Would you please sit down? here the teacher can do use of body movement, put his or her hands down, and friendly gestures like a smile.

Here there are some links that could help you to understad better this topic:

http://changingminds.org/techniques/body/body_language.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrKmfFgDDc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSVk61szem0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjmkb5HCGLA

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:MTBKllM9xPUJ:faculty.tnstate.edu/bchristian1/chapmanpp.ppt+what+is+paralanguage&cd=6&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=mx

ENGLISH ACCENTS AROUND THE WORLD

As we saw in the class, there are many English accents around the world and we saw examples from the classmates who were presenting this topic. I can make a comparison with the spanish accents because as well as the English ones there are a lot of variations and it depends also on the zone where it is spoken.

A good example on the variety of what I am talking about is the scotish accent because there are few differences from the other accents, I mean some of the sounds are preserved like the difference between /hw/ and /w/.

other special feature of this accent is that is a little bit stressed in some words like: cot and caught because they use this phonetic symbol [ɔ]. I found something very interesting here on the words foot, pull, food and pool, because according to my source thiere is not distinction between them, this means that the vowel that they use is a short one, there is a mixture between the vowels, what it is interesting because our teacher told us the difference and one vowel for foot is short and the other one for food is long. This are some of the different characteristics that we can find in scotish accent and depending on the place the accent may change.

Another example is the australian accent, this kind of accent is likely the most rare English accent that I know because they speak like they were saying a tongue twister, because I believe they don`t open the mouth widely and it seems that they use joined speech in all the words they are saying, a good example of this is that when they speak they say words with /t/ and they sound like /d/, this accent is like the one from South Africa. australian accent tend to use the sound /æ/ instead of the sound /a:/ like "celery" and "salary" they both sound the same in Australian accent.

here you have some links in order to know more about English accents:

http://www.ompersonal.com.ar/omaccents2/Australia.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accents_of_English

Here you have some recording of the different accents:

http://www.world-english.org/listen_english_accents.htm

This is a very interesting video about a girl trying to do several English accents, it is very good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k

Minimal pairs

Minimal pairs are pairs or more words that can often be confused while speaking, we have to be very careful because they only change in one phonological element for example work /wɜ:k/, walk/wɔ:k/ and woke /wəʊk/ although the phonetic transcription changes the pronunciation is almost the same so we have to be very careful about it.

Here there are some examples of minimal pairs

a. Ship - sheep

b. Cheap - chip

c. Cat - cut

d. Kite - coat

e. Bought - boat

f. Hit - heat

g. Bins - beans

In the following colums I enlist the most dificult minimal pairs phonemes

Minimal pairs in vowels

Phonemes	Word Pair
/ɒ/ and /ɔ:/	Cop and cope
/e/ and /eI/	Pen and pain
/I/ and /i:/	List and least
/ʊ/ and /u:/	Look and luke
/æ/ and /ʌ/	Cat and Cut

Minimal pairs in consonats

Phonemes	Word pair
/p/ and /b/	Peach and beach
/b/ and /v/	Boat and vote
/l/ and /r/	Alive and arrive
/θ/ and /s/	Thing and Sing
/dʒ/ and /j/	John and Yawn