Searle pointed that illocutionary force in-dicator at least contains word orders, stress, intonation, punctuation, tone and agentive verbs, among which stress, intonation and tone are the typical language prosodic features. The pausing caused by punctuation is also one of the expressions of prosodic features.(Searle J R.2001:30) Gimson mentioned that “a sound has not only quality, whose phonetic nature can be described and function in the language determined, but also length, pitch, and a degree of stress…such as prosodic or suprasegmental. (Gimson.1980:60) “Language prosodic features” refers to: (1) the intonation; (2) the changes of loudness; (3) the stress; (4) the meaning group, the “block” structure segmented by pauses, acceleration and deceleration; (5) variations in vowel lengths; (6) phrasing and overall shifts in speech register, which are all claimed by Gumperz. (Gumperz.1982:100) Prosodic features are tone and stress associated with an entire syllable or word. 

We can conclude that in practical conversation, each phoneme or phoneme combination dependent on different prosodic constituents can represent different meanings. Therefore, the prosodic constituents play more significant role than the phonemic style itself, and can express the emotion and attitude of speakers more directly. And stress, intonation, tone and rhythm are in the spans of prosodic feature as far as we have considered. Prosodic features are considered to embody the pragmatic functions and are a typical feature of language. As a result, prosodic features are one of the most significant ways for language and expression of mind. Understanding oral language, reading sentences and texts are both realized by means of prosodic features. However, in the process of inference in the session language, what kind of role do prosodic features play? This is a problem worth being studied. As a result, we need to analyze how prosody interacts with other components of language to mark the topic to be cohesive or to cause the correlative communicative intention of judgment. In addition, this paper will point out the situation or problems of present English phonetic teaching and come up with some relevant and practical suggestions aiming at improving the current phonetic teaching situation.

2. The Basic Rules of Prosodic Features 源:自/751-·论,文'网·www.751com.cn/

2.1 Stress

2.1.1 The Nature of Stress

Not all the languages have stress, such as Japanese and French. Stress may be defined as the degree of force or loudness with which a sound or syllable is articulated. (Meng Xianzhong.2006:107) In many languages, certain syllables in a word are louder, slight higher in pitch, and somewhat longer in duration than other syllable in a word. They are stressed syllables. For example, the first syllable of digest, the noun meaning “summation of articles” is stressed, whereas the verb meaning “to absorb food,” the second syllable receives greater stress. In English, the accent is traditionally pided into the stress of words and sentences. And the stress of words and sentences is an organic part of words and sentences. Generally speaking, word stress is considered not to be in the suprasegmental domain. At word level, stress is different between the noun and the verb. However, at the sentence level, which word is stressed can change the meaning of the sentence. Here, we mainly discuss the sentence stress. “Introduction to Linguistics”(Wang Dechun.1997:174) The general rule of sentence stress is that the content words need to be stressed, and the stressed syllable is longer and louder; while the function words are generally not stressed.. However, in actual use, the context words can lose sentence stress, and only the words that speakers think they are important need to be stressed, such as “You mayˋdo itˋthis way orˋthat.” Sometimes even the unstressed function words should be stressed in the sentence for the special function or for the rhythm relations. 英语韵律特征的语用功能研究(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_67497.html