After
teaching your students about the some basic expressions, you should ask them to
study about the intonation. Imagine if
the actors are on the stage with the flat dialogues, what will the audience do?
They will close their eyes and have a dream or run away from you.
How
can we do to make the audience still stay behind the seat until the end of the
show?
Right, the actors should have various
intonations to make their performance alive as if the situation were the same
as the reality.
What is an
intonation?
Based on Halliday and Greaves, they have
made some specific types of meanings, and all of them can be achieved through
intonation. They are textual, interpersonal, and logical. They said;
One of the most powerful dimensions of systemic functional linguistics
has been its recognition of the spoken features of rhythm and intonation
(prosody) as grammatical. Thus, far from being simply paralinguistic, prosody
serves to systematically realize meaning in all three metafunctions of
language: Ideational, where language construes experience; Interpersonal, where
it enacts relationships; and Textual, where it engenders discourse.
(LONDON: EQUINOX. 2008. PP. IX, 224. CD ROM)
Let’s discuss one by one meaning
based on Halliday and Greaves:
1. Textual meaning means: related to the real meaning, the language to its ever changing context.
2. Interpersonal : allowing us to enact our social exchanges with others. 3. Logical: construing the logic through which we represent the world we live.
1. Textual meaning means: related to the real meaning, the language to its ever changing context.
2. Interpersonal : allowing us to enact our social exchanges with others. 3. Logical: construing the logic through which we represent the world we live.
Besides, we should pay attention to pitch control. What
is a pitch control? Why should we care of that stuff when we do a drama?
Based on Wikipedia, a pitch means:
Pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a
frequency-related scale.[1] Pitches are compared as "higher" and
"lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,[2] which require
sound whose frequency is clear and stable enough to distinguish from noise.[3]
Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration,
loudness, and timbre.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28music%29 )
In American English, there are four levels:
1. Low : this is at the end of the utterances : this is for weak emotion.
2.Middle : this is for normal conversation : it can
show a weak emotion if it stars from the middle to low.
3. High : this is for the end of yes-no questions.
4 . Very high : this is for normal conversation, for strong emotion or to emphasize. If it starts from very high to low, it shows an
enthusiasm or sarcasm, if it ends to low.
Besides, we have to pay attention to ‘a glide.’ In
linguistics term, the definition of ‘a glide’ is:
a less prominent vowel sound produced by the passing of the vocal organs
to or from the articulatory position of a speech sound.
Then we should know about ‘diphtong.’ The definition of a diphthong is:
A gliding monosyllabic speech sound
(as the vowel combination at the end of toy) that starts at or near the
articulatory position for one vowel and moves to or toward the position of
another; 2. digraph; 3. the ligature a
and e joined together (æ) or o and e joined together.
The diphthong consists of two
(http://www.orbilat.com/General_References/Linguistic_Terms.html ) :
1. The falling
diphthong: a diphthong composed of a vowel followed by a less sonorous glide. Such as: ei, ou, ai, au,
ɔi (face, goat, price, mouth and choice vowels)
2. The rising
diphthong: a diphthong in which the second element is more sonorous than
the first. Such as: hideous, easier, luckier, colloquial, theoretical (based on
John well’s article about The Rising Diphthong)
John Well
also gave an example of the script from Shakespeare’s plays. The title was
Hamlet. Here is:
Have of your audience been
most free and bounteous And call the
noblest to the audience,
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