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Melodic contours in political debates: comparison of British and American English
Vonzová, Veronika ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The thesis focuses on the differences between British and American English in terms of their phrasal characteristics (length of phrases, nuclear pitch movement, pitch range). By doing so, it aims to fill a gap in research which lies in a lack of comparative studies of the two mentioned varieties of English on the suprasegmental level. The theoretical part describes prosody and its functions in language, intonation, and individual types of nuclear pitch movements and their functions. The paper further concentrates on the differences between the British and American schools of intonation notation and also the differences and discrepancies between their terminologies. Finally, it introduces a new term inspired by Czech terminology, FMU, which is not present in English terminology and helps to differentiate between the form and function of the nuclear pitch movements. FMU corresponds to the scope of the Czech term "melodém" (the function of the pitch movement, e.g., the falling FMU), as opposed to the realization (Czech "kadence", the concrete realization of the FMU, e.g., the level-fall). The empirical part presents a study carried out on a sample of 800 phrases (400 British and 400 American), which are compared in the following areas: the length of phrases, type of the nuclear pitch movement, and...
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Effectiveness of teaching English prosodic features in Czech children
Vonzová, Veronika ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Lewis, Suzanne (referee)
and key words The main objective of this paper is to discover if children can acquire prosodic features of English after involving prosody-oriented instruction in the curriculum. The theoretical part of the work at first concentrates on description of prosody, its definition and significance for communication. It then introduces two of its main components: intonation and rhythm, which were also the target phenomena of the analysis in the empirical part. Both of these prosodic aspects are introduced not only in terms of their main characteristics but also in terms of their significance for reaching intelligibility and comprehensibility in the discourse. The work further elaborates upon the importance of involving prosody instruction in English lessons and emphasizes particularities of working with young learners. Since most of the research into the effectiveness of prosody instruction done so far has focused on adults, the empirical part presents a study carried out with two groups of primary school children, an experimental and a control group. The methodology part discusses the design of the lessons as well as the makeup of the recording sessions. The recordings were analysed to see if any progress was made with individual speakers in the course of the school year and then the results of both...
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