خلاصة:
The issue of unmarked intonation pattern in English has always baffled non-native (or
even native) ES/FL teachers and students as to how intonation changes both inter- and
{ntrasententially. This may partially be accounted for in terms of Halliday's (1994) and
Colliny’ (1995) notion of Information Structure. However, almost all novice lunguage
learnets are bereft of such specialist knowledge, The present paper looks into this issue
from both theoretical and experimental perspectives and attempts to identify sources of
such incompetence. It draws upon the previous literature and discusses the expetimental
study conducted for this paper on the acquisition of unmarked intonation pattern by 60
Persian senior students of English at AUCH (Azad University Central Branch) to see
how close their performance would fall to the native speakers vis-a-vis the intonation
pattern. A set of 60 utterances representing 17 types of the English moods was given to
the subjects to read out as their voices were recorded. Using SPSS, a Chi-square was
conducted to measure the frequency of correct and incorrect responses. The results are
discussed and suggestions made.
ملخص الجهاز:
It draws upon the previous literature and discusses the experimental study conducted for this paper on the acquisition of unmarked intonation pattern by 60 Persian senior students of English at AUCB (Azad University Central Branch) to see how close their performance would fall to the native speakers vis-à-vis the intonation pattern.
In doing so, it presents a précis of the previous literature and then discusses the experimental study conducted on the mastery of the English intonation pattern by Persian advanced learners of this language.
Halliday agrees with the Prague School in assuming that one of the functions of intonation in English is to mark off which information the speaker is treating as New, and which as Old such that while New information has tonic prominence, Given information does not, However, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2005 93 he believes this holds true only from the speaker's point of view.
Through studies such as the following we can find out which types2 of utterances prove to be easy and which difficult for Persian learners of English with respect to intonation.
Moreover, as distinguished in the pilot run of this study, (sub) classes that proved more difficult for Persian speakers of English were given a greater proportion on the test, as working on easy categories was considered frivolous.
DISCUSSION In this study it was found that advanced Persian speakers of English are not able to identify unmarked intonation patterns (at least) in decontextualized utterances of this language although their performances Vol, 8, No, 1, March 2005 109 fluctuated between good and poor on different categories of the English moods.