THE TELLTALE SIGNS OF CZECH SPEAKERS’ MOTHER TONGUE IN THEIR ENGLISH INTONATION
Intonation, even though one of the least tangible areas of language (Underhill 1994), is brought to examination here; in particular it is the phenomenon of the most prominent prosodic peak in an utterance. This contribution presents part of the results of a comparative study of the intonation centre placement in English dialogues read by English native speakers and Czech speakers of English. The focal point of the research was to establish whether Czech speakers are able to produce intonation in accordance with the actual message of the text. The framework of the study is represented by the theory of functional sentence perspective.
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