In all languages there exist groups of distinctive sounds. Into Italian language about 30 phonemes have been identified, i. The number of phonemes varies from language to language, and sounds, that in one language have a distinctive value, may not have it in another. In linguistic analysis phonematic or segmental elements and prosodic or suprasegmental elements are often placed in opposition. While phonemic articulation was long considered the indispensable basis of linguistic communication, to prosodic phenomena has long been left only a marginal role.
This is probably due to a still limited and non systematic study of these important aspects of oral communication, which have received more attention only in recent decades, especially in the English linguistics4. Indeed, presence of a sort of melodic movement, in the form of the raising and the lowering of tone of voice, in spoken language have already been repeatedly highlighted.
Without these elements of musicality oral language would be almost incomprehensible5. Prosodic microstructural phenomena have a distinctive value similar to that attributed to phonemes that in linguistic analysis are considered the most distinctive mark.
Duration is determined by consonantal and vowel segment length. Finally, the tone is determined by the frequency of vibration of vocal cords and it is measured in hertzes, so syllables may have a high, middle or low pitch. Its distinctive action is well exemplified in several oriental languages, named exactly tone languages, where, if you vary the tone, also the word will change, as so happens in Italian when you move an accent or double a consonant.
For example in Japanese a transition from middle tone to low tone has distinctive value and it changes meaning 4 Robins , Lyons , Halliday , Halliday According to Luciano Canepari in Western languages there are three main types of tone which act upon the whole utterance and which modulate three fundamental aspects of oral speech: interrogative, conclusive, suspensive7. Go away, I know it well, I do not care and so on ; - the suspensive type communicates the opposite of that of conclusive, and reports that in what is to follow there exists something that deserves attention even if not enunciated eg.
Next to last there is a generally less marked tone called divisive, which has shorter breaks and serves to divide the speech into phono-syntactic groups easily identifiable by the listener. The combination of these and other phonic features generate a melodic flow of oral discourse, named intonation, an important macrostructural prosodic phenomenon which has not only a simple distinctive function, but a really significant function8.
All of the forms of intonation that we have illustrated, through various modulations of tone, contribute to determine the meaning of whole speech. Therefore, we can say that the intonation has an essential role in the significance of oral language. In addition intonation shows para-phonic features through which the psychological and social traits that come into play during speech mostly appear.
So tone, strength and the duration of a spoken phrase and its component parts may assume particular configurations with which the speaker expresses intentions, feelings and emotions in relation to his speech and his interlocutor9. In tone languages, the choice of tone affects the lexical level and to a lesser extent the articulation of the sentence. Instead, in most Western languages there is a lower incidence at the lexical level and a systematic action of intonation on speech sequences through variations in modulation of tone pitch Changes of tone in a sentence have different meanings from language to language, even if the fundamental opposition, used by all with distinctive value, is that between the downward modulation and the upward modulation of 6 Canepari , p.
The ability to modulate the sounds of their language appears very early in children and, much like grammar, is learned naturally, so that the musicality of the language is recognized by the native speaker as a kind of grammaticality. Melodic variation allows the listener to make distinctions between topic and comment, that is, between what is being talked about and what is being said and, among other things, allows the speaker to highlight what he believes to be new for interlocutor and to mitigate what he believes is already known or given.
Through tone prominence, which involves the largest elevation of or lowering of tone, the speaker is allowed to emphasize the information which he is most interested in conveying.
For example if I say: "John went to dinner with Marisa," I mean something other than "John went to dinner with Marisa, than " John went to dinner with Marisa, and even than " John went to dinner with Marisa". Practically the prosody shows the main symptom of the speaker's communicative intention.
It describes the syntactic architecture of oral expression: the groupings of words, terms that should be highlighted, those to be considered complementary, as well as those that can or should be omitted. As a result, communicative intent of the speaker very often completely bypasses grammatical structure of speech and alters the order which seems to us to be so strong because of the established habit of using the written language.
The supremacy of the semantic structure over the grammatical one is most evident in oral language and is very well exemplified by the frequent inversion of the grammatical subject and predicate and the psychological or semantic subject and predicate How does this work? In conversation the grammatical relationship between words and the semantic relationship between meanings quite often do not coincide, because what the speaker wants to say comment is not expressed by the predicate of his sentence as grammar would like , but by the subject, which usually expresses the topic.
So, at the bus stop we can ask someone: "Which bus goes to St. Peter square? But this grammatical structure does not match the semantics. In fact, the two parties are addressing the topic of How to go to St. Peter square and, in this case, The 64, although grammatically a subject, from a semantic point of view is a predicate, that is the comment on the subject. In short, from a semantic point of view things become reversed in the response: what you are talking about is how to go to St.
Peter square and what you say is The To highlight this inversion specific emphasis in intonation is used, where the predicate is stressed via enunciation. This will give us: "The 64 goes there", in which the speaker emphasizes the enunciation of the subject to indicate that in reality it is a predicate. In essence, the intonation has a specific semantic function, which indicates the thought of speaker in relation to that to which he refers.
To conclude we can say that prosody is essential in oral speech either to understand either to be understood, and it is more important than grammaticality, which, 11 Ibid. It is able to largely satisfy the communication needs of almost all communities. According to Walter Ong, among the tens of thousands of languages spoken in the course of human history, only a hundred of them has produced forms of written languages developed enough to give rise to a literature, while most of them have never been written Essentially, it is not a necessary element of human communication, which can also take place even when it cannot rely on vocal elements, as evidenced by the deaf and deaf-blind or other multisensory handicapped which adopt forms of verbal communication completely devoid of phonetic aspects.
Therefore, we may say that orality is a fundamental characteristic of human language, but only a very specialized vocal and auditory apparatus meant that man placed the sound as his main way of communicating and, consequently, of knowing. In primitive human societies working for common goals, transformed into symbolic gesture, was probably the first medium to share the social experience 15, in turn, voice, which was certainly used in a spontaneous way to express individual and collective feelings such as fear, joy, pain, etc.
Probably for a long time vocal sounds and gestures have coexisted and formed a common and integrated sign system perhaps similar to that used by the Indians of America ; in successive time the advantage and practicality of speech supplanted the use of gestures VII 16 De Mauro All cultures have been or are still subject to a «primary» orality, i. Today it is especially problematic for us to conceive of a social situation in which the transmission of knowledge depends on oral communication alone.
In our experience, one thought, once expressed explicitly, disappears and is lost with no return if it does not have the help of writing. Accustomed as we are to making use of texts written by ourselves or by others, we may find it hard to imagine that in an oral culture knowing something or processing an articulate thought may depend exclusively on the ability to keep that thought in mind.
In an oral culture, an ordered and relatively complex set of ideas and thoughts around a subject can be stored in the memory and be recalled if necessary only via specific mnemonic aids. A thought, in order to be recalled, must be translated into a formula or a proverb or a rhythmic structure that establishes its content and facilitates its being recalled.
A typical example of formulaic expression still in use today is the mnemonic rhyme with which we remember how many days there are in each month of the year: Thirty days has November April, June and September of twenty-eight is but one and all the remnant is thirty-one. It allows us to fully understand the roles of rhythmic and repetitive elements that enable us to recall a quite complex sets of facts. Besides, the mind is cluttered only in a minimal way, in fact, we have no need to remember the whole verse but only its beginning and rhythmic motif that binds its elements.
So, in order that their cultural heritage should not go dispersed, oral cultures predispose tools for the fixing and preservation of their social, religious and scientific experience.
In addition to essential phonic-acoustic facilities, the other main tools used are the standard narrative structures the hero, the journey, the battle Thus a complex co-ordination of myths and stories became the vessels in which cultural data, necessary for the survival of communities, might be stored.
In order to be able to pass on all knowledge, oral cultures resort to complex social mechanisms. For example, on the island of Kitawa belonging to a group of Melanesian islands of the Pacific , the population is divided into four major clans and each owns a part of that cultural heritage which is to be passed down.
Sa anche che i suoi amici dei clan B, C e D sono proprietari di altri racconti e sanno recitare altri miti For example Towitara as a member of the clan A is one of the owners of the Flying Canoe story and knows that part of this story is known by some of his cousins, sons of his uncle and aunt He also knows that his friends of the clan B, C and D are the owners of other stories and know how to recite other myths. Ernst Wendland, Studies, This is correct, but it would be helpful to add something to the effect that no biblical poem occurs in isolation; rather, each one appears within an intra-textual context e.
Wendland, Studies, Several diagrams of stages in the parsing and glossing procedure of the short Psalm serve as helpful visual examples in this chapter. In fact, poetry consists of parallelisms on all levels and with regard to all types of linguistic structure.
It might be better to reserve this term to designate higher-level discourse breaks that occur on the macro-structure of a poetic text, e. Some proposed line lengths are debatable, for example, Ps. Diagrams analyzing the poetic lines of sample texts according to person, gender, number, stem, and conjugation are given to illustrate this: Psalm ; Psalm ; Psalm 1; Psalm ; Psalm 98; Psalm ; and Psalm 13 These analyses are very detailed and, in most cases, helpful in revealing the basic micro-structure of a given text.
In contrast, one might view verse 5 as beginning a short strophe that ends after v. The text charting is again done in several stages—first, a sequential line listing of the BHS Hebrew text alongside and English gloss, and second, with a listing of vertical columns according to the type of clause: yiqtol, wayyiqtol, Participle, qatal, Verbless, and Imperative moving from left to right horizontally.
Two psalms are analyzed this way: 29 and 13 The same argument can be made for the other extra-long line identified in In sum, Psalm consists of four symmetrical strophes, each having an introductory verse, which the second verse then develops, building up to a thematic peak in v. I come to the latter conclusion based on the chiastic word order of v. This is illustrated with reference to Psalm ac It would be helpful if the display chart would somehow indicate, perhaps via footnotes, the potential macro-structural significance of all the micro-textual shifts that are indicated, i.
Here v. One could argue in contrast that the principal poetic disjunction is found after v. Readers will have to assess the reality of the preceding assertion for themselves, or whether the complexity of the proposed system of annotation defeats its potential utility.
He also indicates the total number of words in a line and the number of words in each lexical unit. But one wonders how effective, indeed feasible, it would be to apply to a much longer text—that is, for most practical purposes: preparing a sermon, Bible study, exegetical class lecture, or Bible translation.
Three more passages are displayed and annotated in this detailed manner: Psalm ; Proverbs , which is accompanied by several of the other types of charts;46 and Psalm 1 The examples used to illustrate this are Psalm ; ; ; ; and But this is a debatable procedure, at least with regard to conjunctions and negations, which arguably have a certain independent semantic value and function.
One wonders, however, what effect such features would have on the hearers of the biblical text. Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Reston, Virginia: Reston Publishing Co. April, Iser, Wolfgang. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Download references. Language Technology, California Street N.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Mary Dee Harris, Ph. Her research interests are: interaction of metaphor and discourse structure, knowledge-based natural language processing, cognitive linguistic approaches to natural language processing. Reprints and Permissions. Harris, M.
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