Experimental-Phonetic Analysis of Suprasentential Units in the English Language

The current article deals mainly with the suprasentential units in English and their characteristic peculiarities. Some viewpoints of western, Russian and Azerbaijani linguists are discussed here. One of the important matters discussed here is to distinguish the notions “text” and “suprasentential units”, which was possible owing to the viewpoints and investigations of specialists in this field. To determine “suprasentential units”, some other terms such as, “micro-text” and “macro-text” are discussed here, too. To get a detailed information on “suprasentential units”, phonetic experiment was carried out. The essence of the article is to determine the phoneticparameters of “suprasentential units” in the form of a short text. The experiment was realised at the Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. For acoustic analysis of the recorded materials, “Speech Analyser”, “WinCecil”, “PRAAT”, “MacSpeech Lab” programs have been used. In the acoustic analysis of speech signals of the given short text, the valuable “PRAAT” computer program created by the professors of Amsterdam University Paul Boersman and David Veenik has been widely used. “PRAAT” computer program has wide opportunities, such as to hold ossillographic and spectographic analysis of language materials (in our case, short texts), to get indicators of tonal frequency intensity, and length of language materials, etc. The above mentioned computer program provides specialists and learners with the chance of learning speech fragments having the recording time from several m/sec to several hours.


Introduction
The text is connected with the determination of its structural units (or unit) which is one of the important issues of linguistics.
Linguistic analysis of the text is mainly carried out in two directions. The first one focuses on the description of functional-meaning types as the structural unit of speech, and the second one focuses on the classification and description of complex syntactic whole. Here, it is typical to apply the category and notions of sentence syntax on the suprasentential units.
complexes are offered. The hierarchy of text units also includes a syntagma, which is accepted as a universal unit (Scherba, 1974). Researchers suggest either a suprasentential unit or an utterance as a main unit of the voice text. In textology, a suprasentential unit, which is understood as a complex structural whole, consisting of one or two sentences, having the completeness of meaning in a connected speech and acting as a part of complete communication, is considered a constituent of a text.
It should be noted that Pospelov paid a special attention to the study of speech units which opposed language units (sentences). According to the author, "when studying the syntactic structure of speech, the sentence cannot be the first unit, because it is deprived of independence in the connected text and it is only in close contact with other sentences" (Pospelov, 1948). According to Pospelov, "the sequences of sentences that serve to express complex ideas and that are interrelated among themselves, have relative independence in the context. Obviously, the completeness of a thought within a suprasentential unit should be understood as a relative expression. The suprasentential unit, as a single sentence, is semantically related to both previous and next texts, but differs from a single sentence for its possession of a row of unlimited sentences. It is able to express to the listener (reader), the appropriate structures without necessity to increase the number of sentences, periods, subordinate clauses and parenthetical elements (sentences), in order to the quicker understanding of their thoughts" (Pospelov, 1948).

Methodology
As a material of the investigation, some English literary works, newspaper materials, radio and TV-programs in English and Azerbaijani (Az.Lider TV and BBC TV)) have been used. In the investigation complex semantic-intonation analysis has been used. This method analyses the given material from the listening, auditive, electro-acoustic points of view. Besides, comparative and mathematical-statistical analysis methods are also used to investigate and achieve necessary results. The third set of methods used to analyse the suprasentential units include descriptive analysis and contextual analysis of language units.
To get acoustic analysis of the recorded materials, "Speech Analyser", "WinCecil", "PRAAT", "MacSpeech Lab" programs have been used. In the acoustic analysis of speech signals "PRAAT" computer program, which has been created by the professors of Amsterdam University Paul Boersman and David Veenik to hold special experiments, has been widely used. "PRAAT" computer program has wide opportunities, such as to hold ossillographic and spectographic analysis of language materials, to get indicators of tonal frequency intensity, and length of language materials, etc. The given computer program provides learners with the chance of learning speech fragments which have the recording time from several m/sec to 12 hours.

Characteristics of Suprasentential Units
The reasoning of the suprasentential units in the quality of the minimal unit of the text is clarified when considering it in comparison with the sentence. The sentence is only considered as the constituent of suprasentential units. The sentence, which is a relatively large section of the utterance, cannot be an integral part of the whole which joins those sections at the same time. There are certain regularities that raise the sections that are bigger than a sentence to the level of language units. Therefore, special status is applied to suprasentential units.
Bulakhovskiy offers the term "suprasentential unit" "where syntactic indicators exist" for expressions with particular words (Bulakhovskiy, 1952). In his opinion, it is important for complex syntactic wholes to have meaning(s) connectors (pronouns), conjunctions, parenthetical words (elements). In addition, the author links elements of suprasentential units with rhythmic-melodic groups (Bulakhovskiy, 1952). According to him, "in writing, their outer means of expression is a new line separating one whole from another one" (Brizgunova, 1993).
In his article "Discourse Analysis", Haris speaks not of sentences, but of upper sentence units, which are bigger than a sentence. Levis explains suprasentential units like this: "The suprasentential lexical union (unit) is very important in order to reveal the meaning (cohesion) in a spontaneous speech, and the demanded units, having a structured structure, are the unity of sentences with a pragmatic effect and very natural sentence" (James, 1947 It is evident from the quote that to distinguish a suprasentential unit, there must be a single microtheme, the semantic commonness of sentences, the semantic solidarity of sentences, the semantic and communicative unity of sentences. This also denotes that discreteness conditions completeness and independence as a criterion for suprasentential units.
The suprasentential unit is a special syntactic-stylistic unit represented in the form of close interaction of two or more sentences, which are united around a common microtheme. The dependence of the text is provided by the interrelation of the elements that make up the sentence, and within the boundaries of suprasentential units, the interrelation of sentences and the interconnection of the letters can be not only from semantic viewpoint, but also from formal point of view. The formal interconnection of suprasentential units, which create a text, is realized by lexical and grammatical means. Every suprasentential unit has a theme-rheme progression according to the theme-rheme parsing of the sentences included in it.
According to Referovskaya, a suprasentential unit, which is bigger than a sentence and is a component of larger textual units, and ultimately a unit of a text, can be viewed from three points of view: 1) its formal-linguistic structure, and the possibilities of finding out different types of suprasentential units; 2) the nature of lexical and grammatical interconnections that combine sentences into a larger language unit; 3) communicative assignments that they carry out, that is, providing a certain information (Reformatskiy, 1955).
Determination of the theme-rheme relations between sentences within a suprasentential units allows You to trace all the details of building a text, the relations between the theme and the rheme. Moskalskaya offers to use the terms "macro-" and "microtext" to distinguish the essence of the text. The author understands microtext as "a suprasentential unit (a compound syntactic unit)-in a narrow meaning of the word" a text" (Moskalskaya, 1981). Moskalskaya uses three terms-suprasentential unit, compound syntactic whole and microtext-to express the complex utterance arising in the speech process. According to the author, out of the terms singled out, the most common one is the "suprasentential unit": "Suprasentential unit" (microtext), at the same time, is a syntagmatic and a functional notion. It is a specially organized and a closed chain of sentences that, in itself, represent a single utterance" (Moskalskaya, 1981).
According to Moskalskaya, who refers to the content and formal integrity of suprasentential units and points out that "the intertransition of themes and, consequently, the breaking of the thematic progression serves as interchangeable signals between the suprasentential units" (Nikolayeva, 1969).
There are different types of subdivisions defined by 1) the type of sentences included in the whole, and 2) the nature of the relationship between them. These factors may depend on the functional style and the genre's possession of the text and the author's individual style.
Mammadov characterizes the complex syntactic whole as "sentence combinations that combine specific syntactic relationships with the commonness of meaning, relatively regardless of the context" (Mammadov, 2003). According to the author, "together with the meaning characteristic to supraphrasal units, … they also distinguish the structural, syntactic characteristics, and, first of all, the existence of connections between the sentence components of a complex syntactic whole. Obviously, on this basis, they define syntactic units as complex syntactic wholes" (Mammadov, 2003).
Some linguists consider paragraphs to be the same with suprasentential units and define them as the minimal unit of text parsing. For example, when Peshkovskiy, says paragraphs, he implies "a unity of a complex whole from one red line to another" (Pierce, 2000). Peshkovskiy, who doesn't consider a paragraph to be the same with a suprasentential unit, adds that "the interval between paragraphs is relatively longer than that, which separates suprasentential units" (Pierce, 2000). However, it is difficult to agree fully with this approach, because suprasentential unit can sometimes combine several paragraphs. However, Pospelov, who investigates this issue, tries to interpret the paragraph as a composition unit of a "text" (Potapova, 1981). Speaking about the peculiarity of the paragraph, Gvozdev included it in punctuation marks for its function (Glison, 1959).
The main difference between the suprasentential unit and the paragraph is that the suprasentential unit can consist of the utterance creating an entirely objective limited microtheme. However, in spite of the occasional deviations from the main theme in suprasentential unit, there are cases to end it by returning to the breaking point again. The fact that the paragraph covers the finished microtheme spread to neighboring paragraphs is not an absolute issue. As a result, a word, a microtheme, as a rule, is always one suprasentential unit, but a whole suprasentential unit may contain one, two or more paragraphs. This means that it is not an absolute matter to have overlapping boundaries of the paragraph and the suprasentential unit. They only coincide when the objective parsing of the text corresponds to the subjective attitude of the text that the author just created, or when the author emphasizes this or any other detail particularly, or, vice-versa, when he wants to join two or more utterances, of them and each of has a certain meaning in one whole.
Pospelov, who tried first to study fundamentally the complex syntactic whole in Soviet linguistics, has also done a research to identify its features, too. Among the features of complex syntactic whole, the author notes the followings: closed syntactic structure, syntactic independence in the context, intermittent nature of the sentences in a complex syntactic whole, heterogenous character of the composition of the complex syntactic whole, etc. (Potapova, 1981).
In general, suprasentential unit can be defined as a relatively independent unit of the text from the structural-semantic and syntactic-thematic point of view. The idea that the suprasentential unit has constitutive features has always been in the focus of text linguistics. For example, according Friedman, "we cannot talk about the structure of a whole text, but we can deal with the structure of its sections. The whole text is nothing except the totality of its structured sections" (Cheremisina, 1989).
In a language, a suprasentential unit contains information about a single situation and names it. The suprasentential unit in the semantic plan expands and develops "lexical inheritance", the breadth of the content of the subject, until its disclosure (each following member of the complex syntactic whole broadens and develops the contents of the preceding member) (Vall et al., 1984).
In the given example, the suprasentential unit consists of four sentences combined around the description of the night garden.

Material Selection for the Phonetic Experiment
In order to carry out the experimental-phonetic analysis of the suprasentential units in English (based on the English materials), 15 small texts were selected from the English sources. This article presents an experimental-phonetic analysis of only one of those texts. This is the text of "The shops".

The shops
Today the women are going to Oxford Street to shop.

/ˈsʌmtaım
The last ut acoustic pa

Main tone
Intensity p

Temporal p
The acous sequence:

Main tone
Intensity p

Temporal p
In the last the follow

Main tone
Intensity p Temporal p

Results
We should (Zinder,19 2014; Zla meanings difficult to (Zinder,19 The Zinder, taking into consideration this, notes that "every communication act reflects not only what is being talked about (denotative aspect), but also the attitude of the speaker (the connotative aspect) to the information" (Zinder & Stroley, 1957). According to the author, "Removal of emotion from the research object cannot be justified" (Zinder & Stroley, 1957).
Commenting on the function of intonation, Zinder provides information by its two main functions (Zinder & Stroley, 1957) -communicative "whether intonation utterance is completed or not, its (note -by L.G.) consisting of a question, answer and so on" (Zinder & Stroley, 1957), and emotional "a certain emotion that reflects the emotional state of speaker in intonation, takes place" (Zinder & Stroley, 1957).
Within the general communicative function of intonation, Zinder defines the following meanings: 1) intonation is a tool for division of speech into the sentences (utterances), and sentences into syntagms; 2) intonation participates in differentiating communicative types of sentences; 3) intonation is a means of actual parsing of a sentence; 4) parsing into syntagms defined by meaning is accomplished only through intonation and is associated with this or another member of the sentence; 5) intonation signifies the terminal and initial sintagm of a particular speech section (Zinder & Stroley, 1957).
As we have mentioned, the main procedural means of speech are the frequency, length, and intensity of the main tone. The most universal of the prosodic means is the frequency of the main tone, as "all kinds of intonation information can be transmitted by the modification of the main tone frequency" (Zolotova, 1984).
In addition, the main tone frequency is considered dominant among prosodic means and in the interpretation of the information. In study the intonation structure of the utterance, Golovin notes that the emotional shade of the tone of speech is created by the complex mutual influence of the main tone frequency, dynamics and time characteristics (Golovin, 1965).
The use of spontaneous dialogue materials, which are selected basing on the thematic factor (texts on different topics are chosen) in this research can be explained by the fact that an important part of any person's communication activities is made by oral communication, which is unprepared by form and is created at the moment of speech.
Another condition for inclusion of spontaneous dialogues into the experiment materials is that in the oral communicative act, the intonation component becomes an important part of information and acts not as a postsyntactic factor, but as a textual-(discursive) and meaning-forming means.
The functional burden of intonation, is completely, manifested in the spontaneous creation of utterances.
Veysalli describes intonation as "a phonological means which is a suprasegmental phenomenon and plays an important role in conveying ideas to the listener" (Veysalli, 2005), and "from a functional point of view, intonation expresses the question, a relatively completed expression, or its incompleteness in a form of a whole of a thought. We call it an extrinsic function" (Veysalli, 2011). So, … "since the second function of the intonation serves to carry out the inner parsing of a sentences, we call it the intrinsic function of the sentence" (Veysalli, 2013).
A review of studies on the functional aspect of intonation can be summarized as follows: In explaining the acoustic results from experimental-phonetic analysis of the intonation properties of the language material, we will try to refer to the theoretical provisions that we have mentioned.
In the research, the utterances created from prosodic point of view and uttered by the dialogue participants were taken as the main analytical unit while performing the communicative role of the speaker. In the prosodic organization of the utterances a communicative type, variability caused by individual and situational context was registered.
The average tone frequency in the research was calculated basing on summing the maximum and minimum values of the main tone and dividing the score into two.

Conclus
The exper identificati reads the experimen common p As it is evi in the synt In English a suprasentential unites complex structural-semantic unit, which not simply the grouping of the independent sentences possessing communicative importance. A sentence "melts" inside the "suprasentential units", in case there is not a deictic element, they lose their independence. In English, the formal features of suprasentential units include a closed syntactic structure, the syntactic independence in a context, a discrete character among sentences in a complex syntactical whole, heterogenous character of the complex syntactical elements of etc.
In the research the analysis of acoustic parameters has identified the indicators. Subdivision of suprasentential sentences involves two or more sentences, conveying the meaning in the context of communication. It has a complex structure that acts as a part considered as a whole. In English, the subdivisions are a complex structural-semantic unit that is not the result of mere collection of independent sentences within the communicative significance. The sentence melts in the subdivision and loses its independence when there is no dexterous element. In English formal signs of a subdivision include closed syntactic structure, the syntactic independence in the context, the interrupted nature of the sentences in the complex syntactic whole, the complex syntactic whole composition, and so on.
In the analysis of the acoustic parameters in the research the followings as relevant spheres for intonation characteristics have been defined: the frequency level of the beginning of the utterance, the frequency level at the end of the utterance in English and the indicators of the syllable which carries the stress of the utterance. Referring to the acoustic results, it should be noted that the English pronunciation have different intonation contours, depending on the communicative type, the purpose, the number of syntagmas, and their location within the sentence-pre, post and middle position, subjective attitude of the speaker.