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Intonation

Chapter · November 2012

DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1124

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 Suprasegmentals: Intonation
JOHN LEVIS

Intonation

Intonation refers to a combination of acoustic parameters, including duration, intensity,

and pitch used to communicate discourse meaning. It is different from tone, the systematic
use of voice pitch to distinguish lexical items. The most important parameter, pitch, is
determined by the fundamental frequency, or F0, of speech, and is measured in hertz (Hz)
or semitones. F0 can only be measured during voiced intervals because voiceless segments
have no F0, and thus leave a gap in the measurement of pitch, as in the beginning segment
of the word fine in the sentence in Figure 1 (marked by the arrow). Lack of measureable
F0 may also occur because of other features of the speech signal such as excessive creaky
voice or insufficient loudness.
Ladd (2008) diagrams the relationship between the two clearest types of intonational
meaning in English, relative prominence and tune (Figure 2). As an answer to the question,
“How much did it cost?” the falling tune in (a) is a straightforward reply, while the rising
tune in (b) communicates uncertainty or questioning. The different prominence patterns
(or tonicity) in (c) and (d) occur in very different discourse contexts because they single
out FIVE for special attention. If someone asks, “Did you say it cost nine pounds?” the

Ann needs a fine grained one

Figure 1 Fundamental frequency (F0) of the sentence Ann needs a fine-grained one
(using SFS/WASP speech analysis software)

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1124
2 suprasegmentals: intonation

relative prominence

weak-strong strong-weak

falling (a) five POUNDS. (c) FIVE pounds.

tune

rising (b) five POUNDS? (d) FIVE pounds?

Figure 2 Tune and relative prominence in English

answer in (c) can be given, while (d) is used to combine uncertainty and the special atten-
tion to FIVE, as in “Did it cost FIVE pounds? FIVE pounds? I’m not sure.” Regardless of
the discourse context, two distinct uses of pitch are represented, one at the end of utter-
ances, the other marking particular syllables as prominent.

Describing Intonation

According to Ladd (1980), “our first task in analyzing intonation must be to identify the
inventory of meaningful elements” (p. 14). However, there are significant disagreements
in applied linguistics about the linguistic categories of intonation and how they can be
mapped onto the phonetic reality of continuous pitch movement. The inventories of mean-
ingful elements vary according to language, with various ways to describe these elements
even for the same language (Hirst & DeCristo, 1998).
Until the 1970s, intonation was largely described impressionistically. Today, all serious
claims about intonation are subject to instrumental measurement. However, this shift in
approach has not settled the debate over whether intonation is best described as static
(that is, made up of level tones) or dynamic (made up of moving tones).
Straddling these two dominant approaches with a unique approach to description was
Dwight Bolinger, who wrote from the 1950s to around 1990. Bolinger highlighted the
importance of pitch accents, which continue to be central in all descriptions of intonation.
He defined these in terms of the pitch movement used to accent syllables. Thus, “the pitch
does two things at once. First, it signals an accent on that syllable. Second, its direction—
up, down, or level—contributes to the melody” (Bolinger, 1986, 24). Bolinger’s influence
on intonation has been substantial, but his intonational description is rarely referred to in
applied linguistics.
Historically (when looking at descriptions of English), a major disagreement in applied
linguistics descriptions has been whether intonation’s atomic components should be
represented as static or dynamic, that is, whether pitch contours are comprised of pitch
levels or are better seen as holistic configurations. In descriptions of English intonation,
the pitch level approach has been favored by Americans, while the configurations approach
has been favored by British applied linguists. The two approaches have long used differ-
ent notation schemes, whose descriptions largely address many of the same issues. The
traditional American levels approach has always built into meaningful configurations,
while the British configurations approach has always included more basic elements that
make up the configurations. Nonetheless, it is useful to understand the historical evolution
of the two approaches, if only because their formalism remains a powerful mask to under-
lying similarities.
 suprasegmentals: intonation 3

1 Look
2 th fall
3 e It’s i
4 re! ng!

Figure 3 Pike’s four-level system of intonation

The Levels Approach

The levels approach was pioneered by Pike (1945) who posited four phonemic (or tonemic)
pitch levels for American English (Figure 3).
In this approach, intonation is defined in relation to the stressed syllables of speech, similar
to Bolinger’s notion of pitch accent, an insight essential to modern accounts. (See Liberman,
1978, for another treatment.) Stressed syllables start each contour, and an utterance can
have multiple contours. Pitch levels 2 and 3 are the norm for the voice, with level 1 used
for strong emotion or attitudinal meaning, and level 4 used primarily for endings. The
two falling contours in Figure 3 are described as º1–4 and 3-º2–4. The beginning of each
contour is the stressed syllable, and the end is the final point before the next contour
begins. In Pike’s system, it is possible to have multiple, meaningfully distinct contours of
the same general shape, e.g., º1–4, º2–4, º3–4, º2–3, º1–3, and º1–2 are all falling contours,
each with a different attitudinal meaning.
Pike’s formalism was originally meant as both theoretical description (the four levels
were based on English but were thought to be universal) as well as an applied approach
to teach foreign learners of English. Although four levels are no longer used for describing
English intonation, having been replaced by the two-level approach of Pierrehumbert
(1980), four levels are still widely used in applied materials for teaching English (Celce-
Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). After Pike, various researchers used the four-level
system, some with 1 representing the highest level and some with 4, and the actual con-
nection of numbers to pitches was flexible. Today, the standard in pronunciation teaching
materials has the highest pitch as level 4 and the lowest as level 1.
Pike’s approach had flaws, most critical being the system’s descriptive overgeneration
of contours with little clear difference in meaning. If two contours were phonetically dis-
tinct, they were assumed to also be meaningfully distinct. For example, the º2–4 and º3–4
contours were both falling and considered different contours with related meanings. Pike
himself recognized a potential difficulty, saying that contours that were similar in form
(such as the falling contours) shared common abstract meanings, in this case, the meaning
of “CONTRASTIVE POINTING” (Pike’s emphasis, 1945, p. 44).
The levels approach pioneered by Pike was revisited by Liberman (1978), reflecting
renewed interest in intonational description, meaning (Ladd, 1980), and specialized contours
(Bing, 1980). Research on pitch accent in Swedish (e.g., Bruce, 1983) was applied by
Pierrehumbert (1980) to the description of English intonation, providing a principled account
of both phonetic accuracy and phonemic distinctiveness as well as the connections between
underlying tonal structure and the phonetic shape of utterances.
Pierrehumbert’s account also broke new ground in that it relied on instrumental meas-
urements rather than impressionistic description. She argued that H and L tones operated
in three different discourse domains: the pitch accent (at least one in each spoken phrase,
marked with the diacritic *), the end of the intermediate phrase (the phrasal tone, marked
with −), and the end of the intonational phrase (the final boundary tone, marked with %).
The combination of H and L tones therefore make up the contour, such as H* L− H%, or
a falling-rising contour.
4 suprasegmentals: intonation

Pierrehumbert’s account of pitch accents also accounted for the alignment of the pitch
accent to rhythmic structure via the placement of the stressed syllable, such that there
were six possible pitch accents in English (H*, L*, L*+H, H*+L, L+H*, H+L*). In each of
the complex pitch accents, the stressed syllable is aligned with the *, and the pitch move-
ment occurs either before or after the stressed syllable.
Pierrehumbert’s system is now dominant in theoretical and laboratory accounts of
intonation (see Ladd, 2008) and has been codified into the ToBI system (“Tones and Break
Indices”) (http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/) for laboratory investigations in a wide
variety of languages. Investigations using ToBI have led to a variety of modifications to
the original system depending on the languages being investigated. However, the system
is rarely used in applied linguistics research (e.g., Wennerstrom, 1998; Levis, 2002) and
pedagogical materials. This divide between linguistic and applied linguistic accounts of
intonation means that applied linguistics as a field rarely shows awareness of this signi-
ficant body of research.

The Configuration Approach

The other major descriptive approach to intonation can be seen in the British tunes approach,
sometimes called the configuration approach by Bolinger (see Ladd, 1980). Although the
configuration approach also includes smaller elements, as in the levels approach, intona-
tion contours are more often treated as unified wholes, and the overall tunes are treated
as meaningful units of the intonational system. (It can also be argued that the levels
approach included overall tunes, but the impression is that the levels were more important
than the tunes.)
In British accounts of intonation, sentence-final contours are often called “nuclear tones”
(e.g., Cruttenden, 1997) in that they include both the nucleus (or prominent syllable) and
the following pitch movement. Thus a falling nuclear tone would include a prominent
jump in pitch on BEST (the nucleus) and a falling pitch to the end of the utterance. Nuclear
tones are typically marked with shorthand diacritics (e.g., ` ´ ˇ for falling, high rising,
falling-rising, etc.), a system first used by Harold Palmer in 1922 and codified by Roger
Kingdon in 1958 (Ladd, 1980).

(1) A: Is that your friend?

B: He’s my very `BEST friend.

Intonation thus involves, besides other acoustic features, meaningful pitch in several
domains. Halliday (1967) calls the primary domains tone, tonality, and tonicity. Tone (else-
where and more commonly called tune) is intonation to communicate meaning at the end
of a sentence. Thus the choice of rising versus falling in the utterance He’s ready is an
example of a tone choice. Tonality divides spoken phrases, as in the sentence If you leave
now, don’t come back. Third, tonicity is the use of pitch to single out a word or syllable
as informationally prominent, as in HE’S ready versus He’s READy. It also may include
significant uses of pitch range called KEY (Brazil, 1997).
An extensive treatment of intonation from this approach was O’Connor and Arnold
(1961), a work equivalent in scope to Pike’s description of American English. (Like Pike,
they also wrote to teach intonation to foreign learners of English.) Although contours are
largely seen as unified wholes in the configuration approach, pitch is also meaningful
in smaller domains of the utterance. For example, the preceding words in the response in
(1) also have a role in the configurations approach, as in (2). The first stressed syllable
preceding the nucleus is the start of the Head, unstressed syllables before the Head are
 suprasegmentals: intonation 5

called the Prehead, and the syllables following the Nucleus are called the Tail. The intri-
cacies of the full system of description are beyond the scope of this entry, but all were
thought to be meaningful intonational choices.

(2) He’s my very `BEST friend.

prehead | head | nucleus | tail

Intonational Meaning

Intonation contributes to linguistic meaning in a variety of domains, such as marking

juncture between spoken phrases, highlighting, or backgrounding particular words or
syllables, marking the ends of intonational phrases with movement, and using extremes
of pitch range to carry discourse or contrastive meaning. Other types of meaning (e.g.,
emotional) are only partially connected to pitch variation, and native speakers inconsistently
identify emotions from speech (Crystal, 1969; McLemore, 1991).
A mistaken belief is that intonation reinforces grammatical meaning. While intonation
may sometimes correlate with syntax (for example, declaratives in English tend to have
falling tones in most contexts), intonation is not simply a mirror of grammar. Instead, it
provides an independent source of pragmatic or sociolinguistic meaning. Some research
has shown that half of all polar questions (yes/no) in English can occur with rising intonation
and half with falling (Thompson, 1995). Recent research on Dutch shows that phonological,
syntactic and pragmatic factors all serve to distinguish rising intonation and question fall-
rise intonations in read and freely spoken questions (Lickley, Schepman, & Ladd, 2005).
Modern theoretical approaches to meaning do not assume a direct causal link between
intonation and grammar, but the temptation to connect the two remains strong in peda-
gogical approaches.
The kind of meaning that intonation contributes to an utterance remains a subject of
dispute. Pike (1945) believed that intonation directly represents a speaker’s attitude toward
the content of what is being said, reflecting the commonsense saying, “It’s not what she
said, it’s how she said it.” Intonation “modifies the lexical meaning of a sentence by add-
ing to it the speaker’s attitude toward the content of the sentence” (p. 21) and that “if a
man’s tone of voice belies his words, we immediately assume that the intonation more
faithfully reflects his true linguistic intention” (p. 22). Although intuitively appealing,
attitudinal meaning depends both on other features of linguistic and discourse context and
intonational choices (Ladd, 1980; Chun, 2002).
An influential approach to intonational meaning (Halliday, 1967), connected intonation
to information structure: that is, pitch movement on the prominent syllable in English
highlights new information in a tone unit. Likewise, the use of low pitch on informationally
important words signals that the words contain given information that can be expected to
be shared between interlocutors in the context. The appeal to new and given information
is ubiquitous in materials used to teach English intonation to foreign learners. Brazil (1997),
for example, connects new and given information in discourse to the type of nuclear tone
used, that is whether it is generally falling, rising, or level. This discourse intonation approach
has been used in applied linguistics by researchers such as Pickering (2001) and Cauldwell
(n.d.).
An influential approach to meaning is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990). Based on
Pierrehumbert (1980), it provides a compositional account of intonational meaning. Each
domain of intonation (pitch accent, phrasal tones, and boundary tones) contributes abstract
meanings to the overall utterance. Adding these meanings accounts for a logical full
interpretation of an utterance. While this method is comparable to earlier approaches to
6 suprasegmentals: intonation

intonational meanings, such as Pike’s “contrastive pointing” and O’Connor and Arnold’s
compositional meaning tied to different parts of the sentence-level contours, Pierrehumbert
and Hirschberg’s account is too abstract to be applied directly to teaching.
There are still many questions regarding both the description of intonation and the kinds
of meanings it contributes to utterances in discourse. In addition to a large body of work
on English, intonational research is increasingly carried out for many other languages.
European languages remain the most widely studied, with Japanese, Korean, and various
varieties of Chinese also having been examined. Much remains to be done in exploring
the relationship of tone and intonation, in looking at the intonation of more non-European
languages, and in developing applied approaches to intonation that make explicit connec-
tions to laboratory phonology approaches and theoretical accounts of intonational form
and meaning.

SEE ALSO: O’Connor, J. D.; Pike, Kenneth Lee; Suprasegmentals: Discourse Intonation;
Suprasegmentals: Rhythm; Suprasegmentals: Tone

References

Bing, J. (1980). Aspects of English prosody. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and its parts. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Bruce, G. (1983). Accentuation and timing in Swedish. Folia Linguistica, 17, (1–4), 221–38.
Cauldwell, R. (n.d.). Streaming speech. Speechinaction. Retrieved January 15, 2011 from http://
www.speechinaction.com/streamingspeech_course_menu.htm
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book and
reference guide (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Chun, D. (2002). Discourse intonation in L2: From theory and research to practice. Amsterdam,
Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (1969). Prosodic systems and intonation in English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Intonation and grammar in British English. The Hague, Netherlands:
Mouton.
Hirst, D., & DeCristo, A. (1998). Intonation systems: A survey of twenty languages. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Ladd, D. R. (1980). The structure of intonational meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Levis, J. (2002). Reconsidering low-rising intonation in American English. Applied Linguistics,
23(1), 56–82.
Liberman, M. (1978). The intonational system of English. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics
Club.
Lickley, R., Schepman, A., & Ladd, D. R. (2005). Alignment of “phrase accent” lows in Dutch
falling rising questions: Theoretical and methodological implications. Language and Speech,
48(2), 157–83.
McLemore, C. (1991). The pragmatic interpretation of English intonation: Sorority speech (Unpublished
doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at Austin.
O’Connor, J. D., & Arnold, G. F. (1961). Intonation of colloquial English. London, England: Longman.
Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The phonetics and phonology of English intonation. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
 suprasegmentals: intonation 7

Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpret-
ation of discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication
(pp. 271–310). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pickering, L. (2001). The role of tone choice in improving ITA communication in the classroom.
TESOL Quarterly, 35(2), 233–55.
Pike, K. L. (1945). The intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Thompson, S. (1995). Teaching intonation on questions. ELT Journal, 49(3), 235–43.
Wennerstrom, A. (1998). Intonation as cohesion in academic discourse. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 20(1), 1–25.

Suggested Readings

Bolinger, D. (1989). Intonation and its uses. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Wells, J. C. (2006). English intonation: An introduction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Wennerstrom, A. (2001). The music of everyday speech. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Wichmann, A. (2000). Intonation in text and discourse: Beginnings, middles and ends. Harlow,
England: Longman.

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