Witch are the Top 10 most useful English words?

Can you help me with English, please?

• I just want you to correct my mistakes. Thanks in advance for your help. I'd also would be grateful if you give me a mark from 1 to 10. It's my university work on Linguistics :D When we talk to a native speaker of English, we assume that the conversation has been fully understood. It is not difficult to realise that someone gets difficulty in understanding the message that we are trying to convey because a gesture or a simple question is enough to show any misunderstanding in the conversation. If we come across with a face of confusion, maybe something is going wrong. One of the factors that can affect negatively the flow of a conversation is intonation. And, what is intonation? Simple definitions of this concept are understood like “the melody of speech” or “the music of the language”. If we spoke without intonation, our speech would sound monotonous. Instead, when speakers of English speak, they make their voice rise, fall, jump or swoop in many different ways in order to convey meanings. The fact of lowering or raising our voice means that we change our “pitch”. So, intonation is the variation of our pitch (the level at which we speak). Unlike written language where ambiguity can spring up in a sentence like, “This is my brother, Marcos”, in spoken language the use of intonation solves the problem of confusion. If intonation is stressed on “brother” and “Marcos” we assume that Marcos is the brother of the speaker, but if we only stressed “brother” and not “Marcos” we assume that the speaker is addressing to someone called Marcos. In this case, we have used intonation in order to transmit different ideas. In American English, for instance, when someone uses a very high pitch, it indicates surprise; a low pitch indicates anger; and a neutral pitch indicates neutrality. In English, there are different patterns of intonations, too. For example in yes/no questions like “Do you like cake?” the pitch rises high at the end of the sentence, which the common pattern for questions (rising intonation). In this sense, when we speak we emphasise different words in a sentence for special significance, and this is what we call “stress”. At the level of the word, we stress or give emphasis to a syllable, and that syllable is the “stressed syllable”. For example, in the word “inforMAtion”, the stressed syllable is “ma” and the unstressed syllables are “in”, “for”, and “tion”. At the level of the sentence, we also stress words. For example, in “Jenny, the poor child, fell down”, if we stress the words “Jenny” and “fell down”, the unstressed phrase “the poor child” indicates only the attitude of the speaker towards “Jenny” (attitudinal function of intonation). But, if we stress “the poor child” too, we understand that Jenny is a child who is poor. Generally, in a sentence, we stress the words that carry the essential meaning. These kinds of words are called “content words” because they have the key words in a sentence. Content words are nouns, verbs and adjectives; on the other hand, the words that have very little lexical meaning in a sentence are called “grammatical words” because they only establish grammatical relationships. Grammatical words are pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries and adverbs. In the sentence “I don’t speak Italian”, the content words are speak and Italian, while the grammatical words are “I” and “don’t”. Thus, we stress the content words. However, if a person stresses grammatical words, he can be trying to convey a special meaning. For example, if someone says “It is not my fault”, normally, he would stress the content word “fault” because it is the only content word, but if he stresses “not”, he will transmit the idea of “stop blaming me for that”. The way a sentence is told determines its meaning too. And social communication requires of intonation in order to get our messages across and express paralinguistic features like emotions. This way communication can be successful.

• Answer:

  Way too much detail, can't really explain it