The Role of Prosodic Factors in Determining The Meaning of The Text

Intonation is a very complex language unit. It has many functions, and these functions are performed by different phonetic events: 1. A phonetic event that performs the attitude function. This function reflects attitude, emotion, and different phonetic events. For example, depending on the context of the speech and the current situation of the speaker, you can use falling intonation, rising intonation, falling-rising intonation, rising-falling tones. 2. A phonetic event that performs an accentual function. This term is used in connection with an accent. Some phonetics also use stress instead of accent. In this function, the emphasis falls on the last lexical word, and the phonetic event of accentuation and clarification of intonation is performed. 3. A phonetic event that performs a grammatical function. In this function, tone boundaries are defined by intonation. With the help of this phonetic phenomenon, the listener can better recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said. 4. A phonetic event that performs a discourse function. The main task of this phonetic event is to convey to the listener what "new" information is. An eye-catching tonic accent is placed on the appropriate syllable of a particular sound.

Robust adaptive relative motion control for spacecraft proximity operations

This paper studies the controller design for a spacecraft approaching a tumbling space target in the presence of model uncertainties and dynamic couplings between relative rotation and relative translation. An alternative relative attitude function is selected to measure the magnitude of the relative attitude motion carefully, and robust adaptive controllers are designed for relative attitude and relative position to guarantee a desirable stabilization performance uniformly for the relative motion. The strict Lyapunov analysis is presented to prove the uniformly ultimately boundedness of relative motion errors. The relative attitude controller is directly developed on the special orthogonal group SO(3) to avoid complexities and ambiguities associated with coordinate-dependent attitude representations. Performance of the controlled overall system is demonstrated via a representative numerical example.

Intonation and pragmatics

The aim of this essay is to argue that English intonation has broadly two functions. On the one hand it picks out a particular item or items in every sentence in order to give it or them semantic prominence; on the other hand, the pitch CONTOUR of an utterance also contributes to meaning and this contribution may itself be divided into two types: firstly, the height of pitch and the degree of its variation in a given utterance reflect speakers' ‘involvement’ or ‘interest’, and, secondly, the direction of the pitch contour towards or away from a neutral low pitch indicates the degree of ‘completeness’ or ‘incompleteness’ of an utterance in a discourse. I shall argue that the division of intonation into these two main subparts, an ‘accent’ function corresponding to what Halliday calls ‘tonicity’ and an ‘attitude’ function corresponding to Halliday's ‘tone’, is valid since it correlates with the division of meaning analysis into semantics and pragmatics.