Intonation (linguistics)

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In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).

Contents

Transcription

Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need to be explained in the context of what is being described. However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article. Global rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right [↗︎] and falling left-to-right [↘︎], respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope:

He found it on the street?
[hiːˈfaʊndɪt|ɒnðə↗︎ˈˈstɹiːt‖]

Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it.

Yes, he found it on the street.
[↘︎ˈjɛs‖hiˈfaʊndɪt|ɒnðə↘︎ˈstɹiːt‖]
How did you ever escape?
[↗︎ˈˈhaʊdɪdjuː|ˈɛvɚ|ə↘︎ˈˈskeɪp‖]

Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question.

In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished:

It is also common to trace the pitch of a phrase with a line above the phrase, adjacent to the phrase, or even through (overstriking) the phrase. Such usage is not supported by Unicode as of 2015, but the symbols have been submitted. The following example requires an SIL font such as Gentium Plus, either as the default browser font or as the user-defined font for IPA text, for which see Template:IPA#Usage.

[]
[mɑmɑmɑtʰədaⁱəzsatʰədaⁱjɛs]

Functions

All vocal languages use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use intonation in addition to using pitch for distinguishing words. [1] Many writers have attempted to produce a list of distinct functions of intonation. Perhaps the longest was that of W.R. Lee, [2] who proposed ten. J.C. Wells [3] and E. Couper-Kuhlen [4] both put forward six functions. Wells's list is given below; the examples are not his:

example: a fall from a high pitch on the 'mor' syllable of "good morning" suggests more excitement than a fall from a low pitch
example: it is claimed that in English a falling pitch movement is associated with statements, but a rising pitch turns a statement into a yes–no question, as in He's going ↗home?. This use of intonation is more typical of American English than of British.
example: in English I saw a ↘man in the garden answers "Whom did you see?" or "What happened?", while I ↘saw a man in the garden answers "Did you hear a man in the garden?"
example: subordinate clauses often have lower pitch, faster tempo and narrower pitch range than their main clause, as in the case of the material in parentheses in "The Red Planet (as it's known) is fourth from the sun"
example: the utterance "You can have it in red blue green yellow or ↘black" is more difficult to understand and remember than the same utterance divided into tone units as in "You can have it in ↗red | ↗blue | ↗green | ↗yellow | or ↘black"
example: group membership can be indicated by the use of intonation patterns adopted specifically by that group, such as street vendors or preachers. The so-called high rising terminal, where a statement ends with a high rising pitch movement, is said to be typical of younger speakers of English, and possibly to be more widely found among young female speakers.

It is not known whether such a list would apply to other languages without alteration.

English

The description of English intonation has developed along different lines in the US and in Britain.

British analyses

British descriptions of English intonation can be traced back to the 16th century. [5] Early in the 20th century the dominant approach in the description of English and French intonation was based on a small number of basic "tunes" associated with intonation units: in a typical description, Tune 1 is falling, with final fall, while Tune 2 has a final rise. [6] Phoneticians such as H. E. Palmer [7] broke up the intonation of such units into smaller components, the most important of which was the nucleus, which corresponds to the main accented syllable of the intonation unit, usually in the last lexical word of the intonation unit. Each nucleus carries one of a small number of nuclear tones, usually including fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and possibly others. The nucleus may be preceded by a head containing stressed syllables preceding the nucleus, and a tail consisting of syllables following the nucleus within the tone unit. Unstressed syllables preceding the head (if present) or nucleus (if there is no head) constitute a pre-head. This approach was further developed by Halliday [8] and by O'Connor and Arnold, [9] though with considerable variation in terminology. This "Standard British" treatment of intonation in its present-day form is explained in detail by Wells [10] and in a simplified version by Roach. [11] Halliday saw the functions of intonation as depending on choices in three main variables: Tonality (division of speech into intonation units), Tonicity (the placement of the tonic syllable or nucleus) and Tone (choice of nuclear tone); [12] these terms (sometimes referred to as "the three T's") have been used more recently. [10]

Research by Crystal [13] [14] emphasized the importance of making generalizations about intonation based on authentic, unscripted speech, and the roles played by prosodic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness and rhythmicality in communicative functions usually attributed to intonation.

The transcription of intonation in such approaches is normally incorporated into the line of text. A typical example would be:

We ˌlooked at the ↗sky | and ˈsaw the ↘clouds

In this example, the | mark indicates a division between intonation units.

An influential development in British studies of intonation has been Discourse Intonation, an offshoot of Discourse Analysis first put forward by David Brazil. [15] [16] This approach lays great emphasis on the communicative and informational use of intonation, pointing out its use for distinguishing between presenting new information and referring to old, shared information, as well as signalling the relative status of participants in a conversation (e.g. teacher-pupil, or doctor-patient) and helping to regulate conversational turn-taking. The description of intonation in this approach owes much to Halliday. Intonation is analysed purely in terms of pitch movements and "key" and makes little reference to the other prosodic features usually thought to play a part in conversational interaction.

American approaches

The dominant framework used for American English from the 1940s to the 1990s was based on the idea of pitch phonemes, or tonemes. In the work of Trager and Smith [17] there are four contrastive levels of pitch: low (1), middle (2), high (3), and very high (4). (The important work of Kenneth Pike on the same subject [18] had the four pitch levels labelled in the opposite way, with (1) being high and (4) being low). In its final form, the Trager and Smith system was highly complex, each pitch phoneme having four pitch allophones (or allotones); there was also a Terminal Contour to end an intonation clause, as well as four stress phonemes. [19] Some generalizations using this formalism are given below. The American linguist Dwight Bolinger carried on a long campaign to argue that pitch contours were more important in the study of intonation than individual pitch levels. [20]

Thus the two basic sentence pitch contours are rising-falling and rising. However, other within-sentence rises and falls result from the placement of prominence on the stressed syllables of certain words.

For declaratives or wh-questions with a final decline, the decline is located as a step-down to the syllable after the last prominently stressed syllable, or as a down-glide on the last syllable itself if it is prominently stressed. But for final rising pitch on yes–no questions, the rise always occurs as an upward step to the last stressed syllable, and the high (3) pitch is retained through the rest of the sentence.

The ToBI system

A more recent approach to the analysis of intonation grew out of the research of Janet Pierrehumbert [23] and developed into the system most widely known by the name of ToBI (short for "Tones and Break Indices"). The approach is sometimes referred to as autosegmental. The most important points of this system are the following:

  • Only two tones, associated with pitch accents, are recognised, these being H (high) and L (low); all other tonal contours are made up of combinations of H, L and some other modifying elements.
  • In addition to the two tones mentioned above, the phonological system includes "break indices" used to mark the boundaries between prosodic elements. Breaks may be of different levels.
  • Tones are linked to stressed syllables: an asterisk is used to indicate a tone that must be aligned with a stressed syllable.
  • In addition, there are phrasal accents which signal the pitch at the end of an intermediate phrase (e.g. H− and L−), and boundary tones at full phrase boundaries (e.g. H% and L%).
  • A full ToBI transcription includes not only the above phonological elements, but also the acoustic signal on which the transcription is based. The ToBI system is intended to be used in computer-based transcription.

A simplified example of a ToBI transcription is given below. In this example, two phrases "we looked at the sky" and "and saw the clouds" are combined into one larger intonational phrase; there is a rise on "sky" and a fall on "clouds":

      L*                    L*H−       H*      H* L−L%
we looked at the sky and saw the clouds

Because of its simplicity compared with previous analyses, the ToBI system has been very influential and has been adapted for describing several other languages. [24]

French

French intonation differs substantially from that of English. [25] There are four primary patterns.

Continuation pattern

The most distinctive feature of French intonation is the continuation pattern. While many languages, such as English and Spanish, place stress on a particular syllable of each word, and while many speakers of languages such as English may accompany this stress with a rising intonation, French has neither stress nor distinctive intonation on a given syllable. Instead, on the final syllable of every "rhythm group" except the last one in a sentence, there is placed a rising pitch. For example [26] (as before the pitch change arrows ↘ and ↗ apply to the syllable immediately following the arrow):

Adjectives are in the same rhythm group as their noun. Each item in a list forms its own rhythm group:

Side comments inserted into the middle of a sentence form their own rhythm group:

Finality pattern

As can be seen in the example sentences above, a sharp fall in pitch is placed on the last syllable of a declarative statement. The preceding syllables of the final rhythm group are at a relatively high pitch.

Yes/no pattern

Most commonly in informal speech, a yes/no question is indicated by a sharply rising pitch alone, without any change or rearrangement of words. For example [27]

A form found in both spoken and written French is the Est-ce que ... ("Is it that ...") construction, in which the spoken question can end in either a rising or a falling pitch:

The most formal form for a yes/no question, which is also found in both spoken and written French, inverts the order of the subject and verb. There too, the spoken question can end in either a rising or a falling pitch:

Sometimes yes/no questions begin with a topic phrase, specifying the focus of the utterance. Then, the initial topic phrase follows the intonation pattern of a declarative sentence, and the rest of the question follows the usual yes/no question pattern: [28]

Information question pattern

Information questions begin with a question word such as qui, pourquoi, combien, etc., referred to in linguistics as interrogatives. The question word may be followed in French by est-ce que (as in English "(where) is it that ...") or est-ce qui, or by inversion of the subject-verb order (as in "where goes he?"). The sentence starts at a relatively high pitch which falls away rapidly after the question word, or its first syllable in case of a polysyllabic question word. There may be a small increase in pitch on the final syllable of the question. For example: [29]

In both cases, the question both begins and ends at higher pitches than does a declarative sentence.

In informal speech, the question word is sometimes put at the end of the sentence. In this case, the question ends at a high pitch, often with a slight rise on the high final syllable. The question may also start at a slightly higher pitch: [30]

Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language so pitch contours within a word distinguish the word from other words with the same vowels and consonants. Nevertheless, Mandarin also has intonation patterns that indicate the nature of the sentence as a whole.

There are four basic sentence types having distinctive intonation: declarative sentences, unmarked interrogative questions, yes–no questions marked as such with the sentence-final particle ma, and A-not-A questions of the form "He go not go" (meaning "Does he go or not?"). In the Beijing dialect, they are intonationally distinguished for the average speaker as follows, using a pitch scale from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest): [31] [32]

Thus, questions are begun with a higher pitch than are declarative sentences; pitch rises and then falls in all sentences; and in yes–no questions and unmarked questions pitch rises at the end of the sentence, while for declarative sentences and A-not-A questions the sentence ends at very low pitch.

Because Mandarin distinguishes words on the basis of within-syllable tones, these tones create fluctuations of pitch around the sentence patterns indicated above. Thus, sentence patterns can be thought of as bands whose pitch varies over the course of the sentence, and changes of syllable pitch cause fluctuations within the band.

Furthermore, the details of Mandarin intonation are affected by various factors like the tone of the final syllable, the presence or absence of focus (centering of attention) on the final word, and the dialect of the speaker. [31]

Punjabi

Intonation in Punjabi has always been an area of discussion and experimentation. There are different studies [Gill and Gleason (1969), Malik (1995), Kalra (1982), Bhatia (1993), Joshi (1972 & 1989)] [33] [34] [35] that explain intonation in Punjabi, according to their respective theories and models.

Chander Shekhar Singh carried forward a description of the experimental phonetics and phonology of Punjabi intonation based on sentences read in isolation. His research design is based on the classification of two different levels of intonation (horizontal level and vertical level). The first experiment (at the horizontal level) is conducted to investigate three utterance types: declarative, imperative, and interrogative. In his second experiment, the investigation of sentences is conducted to view intonation but in vertical sense. 'Vertical' here means a comparative analysis of intonations of the three types of sentences by keeping the nuclear intonation constant. [36]

The experiment shows some extremely significant results. The vertical level demonstrates four different types of accentuations in Punjabi:

  1. Normal statement
  2. Simple emphatic
  3. Confirmation
  4. Information
  5. Doubtful/Exclamation

The second experiment provides a significant difference between the horizontal level and the vertical level. [37]

Comparative studies

Cruttenden points out the extreme difficulty of making meaningful comparisons among the intonation systems of different languages, the difficulty being compounded by the lack of an agreed descriptive framework. [38]

Falling intonation is said to be used at the end of questions in some languages, including Hawaiian, Fijian, and Samoan and in Greenlandic. It is also used in Hawaiian Creole English, presumably derived from Hawaiian. Rises are common on statements in urban Belfast; falls on most questions have been said to be typical of urban Leeds speech.[ citation needed ]

An ESRC-funded project (E. Grabe, B. Post and F. Nolan) to study the intonation of nine urban accents of British English in five different speaking styles has resulted in the IViE Corpus and a purpose-built transcription system. The corpus and notation system can be downloaded from the project's website. [39] Following on this work is a paper explaining that the dialects of British and Irish English vary substantially. [40]

A project to bring together descriptions of the intonation of twenty different languages, ideally using a unified descriptive framework (INTSINT), resulted in a book published in 1998 by D. Hirst and A. Di Cristo. [41] The languages described are American English, British English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Western Arabic (Moroccan), Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese and Beijing Chinese. A number of contributing authors did not use the INTSINT system but preferred to use their own system.

Disorders

Those with congenital amusia show impaired ability to discriminate, identify and imitate the intonation of the final words in sentences. [42]

See also

Related Research Articles

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.

A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Question</span> Request for information

A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.

The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes-or-no questions. HRT has been claimed to be especially common among younger speakers and women, though its exact sociolinguistic implications are an ongoing subject of research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese pitch accent</span> Japanese language feature

Japanese pitch accent is a feature of the Japanese language that distinguishes words by accenting particular morae in most Japanese dialects. The nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects. For instance, the word for "river" is in the Tokyo dialect, with the accent on the second mora, but in the Kansai dialect it is. A final or is often devoiced to or after a downstep and an unvoiced consonant.

In the phonology of the Romanian language, the phoneme inventory consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels, and twenty consonants. In addition, as with other languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings.

In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.

In linguistic pragmatics, the term metalocutionary act is sometimes used for a speech act that refers to the forms and functions of the discourse itself rather than continuing the substantive development of the discourse.

The phonology of Bengali, like that of its neighbouring Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, is characterised by a wide variety of diphthongs and inherent back vowels.

Like most other Niger–Congo languages, Sesotho is a tonal language, spoken with two basic tones, high (H) and low (L). The Sesotho grammatical tone system is rather complex and uses a large number of "sandhi" rules.

The phonology of Turkish deals with current phonology and phonetics, particularly of Istanbul Turkish. A notable feature of the phonology of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that causes vowels in most words to be either front or back and either rounded or unrounded. Velar stop consonants have palatal allophones before front vowels.

In linguistics, a prosodic unit is a segment of speech that occurs with specific prosodic properties. These properties can be those of stress, intonation, or tonal patterns.

Metrical phonology is a theory of stress or linguistic prominence. The innovative feature of this theory is that the prominence of a unit is defined relative to other units in the same phrase. For example, in the most common pronunciation of the phrase "doctors use penicillin", the syllable '-ci-' is the strongest or most stressed syllable in the phrase, but the syllable 'doc-' is more stressed than the syllable '-tors'. Previously, generative phonologists and the American Structuralists represented prosodic prominence as a feature that applied to individual phonemes (segments) or syllables. This feature could take on multiple values to indicate various levels of stress. Stress was assigned using the cyclic reapplication of rules to words and phrases.

Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.

The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual pronunciation varies widely among speakers, as they introduce elements of their native varieties. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese possesses a neutral tone, used on weak syllables.

ToBI is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, which was the first ToBI system, developed by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert, among others. Other ToBI systems have been defined for a number of languages; for example, J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese, and an adaptation of ToBI to describe Dutch intonation was developed by Carlos Gussenhoven, and called ToDI. Another variation of ToBI, called IViE, was established in 1998 to enable comparison between several dialects of British English.

Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent and stress placement.

The term boundary tone refers to a rise or fall in pitch that occurs in speech at the end of a sentence or other utterance, or, if a sentence is divided into two or more intonational phrases, at the end of each intonational phrase. It can also refer to a low or high intonational tone at the beginning of an utterance or intonational phrase.

Amongst the Iranian languages, the phonology of Pashto is of middle complexity, but its morphology is very complex.

In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives.

  1. Rising declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
  2. Falling declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
  3. Polar question: Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?

References

  1. ↑ Cruttenden 1997, p. 8–10.
  2. ↑ Lee 1956.
  3. ↑ Wells 2006, p. 11–12.
  4. ↑ Couper-Kuhlen 1986, p. Chapter 6.
  5. ↑ Cruttenden 1997, p. 26.
  6. ↑ Jones 1922, pp. 275–297.
  7. ↑ Palmer 1922.
  8. ↑ Halliday 1967.
  9. ↑ O'Connor & Arnold 1971.
  10. 1 2 Wells 2006.
  11. ↑ Roach 2009, pp. 119–160.
  12. ↑ Halliday & Greaves 2008.
  13. ↑ Crystal 1969.
  14. ↑ Crystal 1975.
  15. ↑ Brazil 1975.
  16. ↑ Brazil, Coulthard & Johns 1980.
  17. ↑ Trager & Smith 1951.
  18. ↑ Pike 1945.
  19. ↑ Trager 1964.
  20. ↑ Bolinger 1951.
  21. ↑ Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin 1996.
  22. ↑ Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin 1996, p. 185.
  23. ↑ Pierrehumbert 1980.
  24. ↑ ToBI
  25. ↑ Lian 1980.
  26. ↑ Lian 1980, p. 35.
  27. ↑ Lian 1980, p. 65.
  28. ↑ Lian 1980, p. 78.
  29. ↑ Lian 1980, p. 88.
  30. ↑ Lian 1980, p. 90.
  31. 1 2 Schack 2000, p. 29.
  32. ↑ Shen 1990, p. 95.
  33. ↑ Gill, HS; Gleason, HA (1969). A Reference Grammar of Punjabi. Department of Linguistics, Punjabi University.
  34. ↑ Malik, Amar Nath (1995). The Phonology and Morphology of Panjabi. Munshiram Manoharlal. ISBN   9788121506441.
  35. ↑ Kalra, AK (1982). "Some topics on Punjabi Phonology". Delhi University.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  36. ↑ Singh, Chander Shekhar. (2014). Punjabi intonation : an experimental study. München: Lincom Europa. ISBN   9783862885558. OCLC   883617130.
  37. ↑ Singh 2014.
  38. ↑ Cruttenden 1997, p. Section 5.4.
  39. ↑ Grabe, Esther; Nolan, Francis. "English Intonation in the British Isles". The IViE Corpus.
  40. ↑ Grabe 2004, pp. 9–31.
  41. ↑ Hirst & Di Cristo 1998.
  42. ↑ Liu et al. 2010.

Bibliography

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