试题出自试卷《中国社会科学院2017年考博英语（A卷）真题》

In linguistics, prosody is concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech. These contribute to linguistic functions such as intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus. In the study of prosodic aspects of speech it is usual to distinguish between auditory and acoustic measures. Auditory and acoustic measures of prosody do not correspond in a linear way. The majority of studies of prosody have been based on auditory analysis using auditory scales. There is no agreed number of prosodic variables. In auditory terms, the major variables are the pitch of the voice, length of sounds, prominence and timbre. In acoustic terms, these correspond reasonably closely to fundamental frequency, duration, intensity and spectral characteristics. Different combinations of these variables are exploited in the linguistic functions of intonation and stress, as well as other prosodic features such as rhythm, tempo and loudness. Additional prosodic variables have been studied, including voice quality and pausing. Prosodic features are said to be suprasegmental, since they are properties of units of speech larger than the individual segment. It is necessary to distinguish between the personal, background characteristics that belong to an individual’s voice and the independently variable prosodic features that are used contrastively to communicate meaning. Personal characteristics are not linguistically significant. It is not possible to say with any accuracy which aspects of prosody are found in all languages and which are specific to a particular language or dialect. Intonation is occasionally described entirely in terms of pitch, while at other times it is proposed as being in fact an amalgam of several prosodic variables. The form of English intonation is often said to be based on three aspects: tonality, tonicity and tone. An additional pitch-related variation is pitch range: speakers are capable of speaking sometimes with a wide range of pitch, at other times with a narrow range. English has been said to make use of changes in key: shifting one’s intonation into the higher or lower part of one’s pitch range is believed to be meaningful in certain contexts. From the perceptual point of view, stress functions as the means of making a syllable prominent; stress may be studied in terms of lexical stress, or in relation to larger units of speech, traditionally referred to as prosodic stress. Stressed syllables are made prominent by several variables, singly or in combination. Stress is typically associated with pitch prominence, increased length, increased loudness and differences in timbre. In English and some other languages, stress is associated with aspects of vowel quality whose acoustic correlate is the formant frequencies or spectrum of the vowel. Unstressed vowels tend to be centralized relative to stressed vowels, which are normally more peripheral in quality. These cues to stress are not equally powerful. Cruttenden, for example, writes “Perceptual experiments have clearly shown that, in English at any rate, the three features (pitch, length and loudness) form a scale of importance in bringing syllables into prominence, pitch being the most efficacious, and loudness the least so”. When pitch prominence is the major factor, the resulting prominence is often called accent rather than stress. There is considerable variation from language to language concerning the role of stress in identifying words or in interpreting grammar and syntax.
1.Some elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or by choice of vocabulary are ________.
2.Measures that may objectively quantify the physical properties of sound are referred to as ________.
3. In spite of the suprasegmental nature of prosodic features, exceptionally a single segment may constitute a syllable, or even a whole utterance. A good illustration would be the expression ________.
4. In a research paradigm, a person’s habitual pitch range would constitute one of the ________.
5. In the reading passage above, “tonicity” means ________.