Pitch, Stress, Juncture & Intonation

• Phoneme - is a distinct unit of sound in a specified language that can be used to make one word different from another
• Graphemes - are various letters and letter combinations used to represent a sound.
• Morpheme - is the smallest linguistic unit that contains an element of a word that cannot be divided into smaller parts
• Pitch - is the highness and lowness of a sound
• Intonation - is the variation in the pitch level of the voice.
• Stress or accent - is relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence
• Juncture - is a pause or slight delay in a continuous flow of speech.
• Suprasegmental - also called prosodic feature, in phonetics, a speech feature such as stress, tone, or word juncture that accompanies or is added over consonants and vowels
• Human speech communication involves not just the production of sounds as segments but a complex of acoustic variants which are called suprasegmental features.
• Syllable - the smallest basic unit for the analysis of supra-segmental features
• Pitch - is the loudness and lowness of our voice. It gives subtle meaning to sentences. It is Also part of language includes both intonation and tone
• Four contrastive levels

  of pitch: low, middle, high, very high
• Intonation- plays a role in determining utterance meaning.
• Falling Intonation- means that the pitch falls with time. Also used on the last stressed syllable of the sentence
• DIPPING OR FALL-RISE INTONATION - The pitch is low at first then it rises at the end of the sentence.
• PEAKING OR RISE-FALL INTONATION - rises and then falls. This means that your pitch rises & then falls on the focus word (the most important word in the sentence). pattern is used in statements and in WH questions. These are questions that begin with  the “wh” words such as who, where & what
• RISING INTONATION - The pitch of the voice rises over time
• Stress - refers to emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word phrase or sentences.
• Two-syllable verbs are stressed on the last syllable, e.g. beware, collide, deceive
• Two-syllable prepositions are stressed on the

  second syllable
• Two-syllable nouns of English origin and old borrowings are stressed on the first syllable
• primary stress (long and loud) - is the point of greatest prominence in the word. It is found in monosyllables pronounced in isolation and in one syllable of all polysyllables. It will be symbolized here by a short vertical mark above the line before the stressed syllable. Symbol (').
• minimal or weak stress - The lightest emphasis given to one or more syllables in a word. It is found in practically all English words of more than one syllable and it will be left it unmarked.
• secondary stress (short and quiet) - is an intermediary stress between the primary and the minimal. It is found in many words of three or more syllables and will be symbolized here by a short vertical mark before the stressed syllable but below the line (ᵕ).
• Juncture - Is the manner of moving between two successive syllables in speech. A cue by means in which listener can distinguish between two otherwise identical sequences of sounds that have different meanings.
•  Single bar(/) - Indicates the need for a slight pause between two thought groups in a sentence.
• Double bar juncture (//) - Indicates the need for a longer pause between two thought groups in a sentence.
• Double cross juncture (#) -Characterizes a drop in pitch. The pausing time responds to a need for semi-colon, colon or period.