Functions of Intonation

Introduction

Intonation plays an important role in conveying meaning. A.C

Gimson (1970) says that "the meaning of an utterance, i.e. the
information it conveys to a listener, derives not only from its changing
sound pattern and the contrastive accentual prominences…, but also from
associated variations of pitch." The falls and rises happen in the pitch
level, or patterns of intonation do perform several functions in language.
Intonation has attitudinal, accentual, grammatical and discourse
functions. Peter Roach has talked about these functions in his book
English Phonetics and Phonology (1983) and his views and his treatment
to the subject henceforth will be presented.

The attitudinal function of intonation

The attitudinal function of intonation is concerned with "the

communication of personal attitude" as indicated by Crystal (1980),
"Sarcasm, puzzlement, anger, etc., can all be signalled by contrasts in
pitch, along with other prosodic and paralinguistic features." It is used to
indicate to the hearer a particular attitude on the part of the speaker (e.g.
friendly, doubtful or enthusiastic). This function applies equally to
utterances of one or more than one word.

Several attempts have been made to analyze the attitudinal function of

intonation, using different procedures and approaches, but often it is a
hard job to succeed in. It seems that a useful and realistic approach is to
study recordings of different speakers' natural, spontaneous speech and
try to make generalizations about attitudes and intonation on this basis. If
new discoveries about intonation are to be made, it will be as a result of
studying what people actually say rather than inventing examples of what
they might say.

In order to reach effective conclusion, one should imagine (or even

actually perform) the pronunciation of a sentence in a number of different
ways: for example, if the sentence was `I want to buy a new car' and one
was to say it in the following ways: "pleading", "angry", "sad", "happy",
"proud", it is certain that at least some of the performances will be
different from some others. One will have used variations in loudness

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and speed, for example; certainly one will have used different voice
qualities for different attitudes. Also, one may have used various pitch
range. It is very likely that one will have used different facial
expressions, gestures and body movements.

Due to the importance of these factors it becomes necessary to

consider how they are related to intonation, and what intonation itself
consists of. Intonation consists of three types of components: sequential
components, prosodic components and paralinguistic components. It is
more correct to call them variables. Let us shed light on them one by one
as follows. First, the sequential components of intonation are found as
elements in sequences of other such elements occurring one after another
(never simultaneously). These are: (1) pre-heads, heads, tonic syllables
and tails (with their pitch possibilities); (2) pauses and (3) tone-unit
boundaries.

Second, the prosodic components are characteristics of speech

which are constantly present and observable while speech is going on.
The most important include width of pitch range, key, loudness, speed
and voice quality. It is not possible for anyone to speak without his
speech having some degree or type of pitch range, loudness, speed and
voice quality.

Third, paralinguistic variables, such as facial expressions, gestures

and body movements are of great importance in conveying attitudes and
emotions. People who study human behaviour use the term body
language for such activity. One could also mention certain vocal effects
such as laughs and sobs. These are obviously relevant to the act of
speaking but could not themselves properly be regarded as components
of speech.

It is certainly true that a few generalizations can be made about the

attitudinal functions of some components of intonation. Within tone, for
example, most books agree on some basic meanings; here are some
examples. The fall tone indicates finality and definiteness, e.g."That is
the end of the news" or "I'm absolutely certain." The rise tone refers
usually to general questions: "Can you help me?", "Is it over?", listing:
"red, brown, yellow or blue", continuing the speech as there is more to
follow, e.g. "I phoned them right a way"(and they agreed to come) and

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"You must write it a gain (and this time, get it right) or encouragement,
e.g."It won't hurt". As for the fall-rise tone, it indicates uncertainty,
doubt, e.g."You may be right", "It's possible" or requesting, e.g."Can I
buy it", "Will you lend it to me". Concerning the rise-fall tone, it often
indicates surprise or admiration, e.g."You were first" and" All of them."

However, generalizations such as these are too broad, and foreign

learners do not find it easy to learn to use intonation through studying
them. The attitudinal use of intonation is something that is best acquired
through talking with and listening to English speakers and this study of
intonation aims simply at training learners to be more aware of and
sensitive to the way English speakers use intonation.

The accentual function of intonation

The term accentual is derived from "accent", a word used by some

writers to refer to "stress". There is one particular aspect of stress that
could be regarded as part of intonation: it is the placement of the tonic
stress within the tone-unit. It would be reasonable to suggest that while
word stress was independent of intonation, the placement of tonic stress
was the accentual function of intonation. Some older pronunciation
handbooks refer to this area as "sentence stress", which is not an
appropriate name: the sentence is a unit of grammar, while the location of
tonic stress is a matter which concerns the tone unit, a unit of phonology.

The location of the tonic syllable is of considerable linguistic

importance. The most common position for this is on the last lexical
word (e.g. noun, adjective, verb, adverb as distinct from the function
words) of the tone-unit. For contrastive purposes, however, any word
may become the tonic syllable. The example "I want to know where he's
travelling to" represents normal placement. It should be noted that the
word `to', being a preposition and not a lexical word, is not stressed,
whereas "I want to know where he's travelling to" represents a
contrastive placement since the one who has said so does not want to
know where he's travelling from. Similarly, for the purpose of emphasis,
we may place the tonic stress in other positions. The example "It was
'very boring" is non-emphatic, whereas " It was very boring" is
emphatic.

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 It should be mentioned here that it would be wrong to say that the
only cases of departure from putting tonic stress on the last lexical word
were cases of contrast or emphasis. There are quite a few situations
where it is normal for the tonic syllable to come earlier in the cone-unit.
A well-known example is the sentence `I have plans to leave'; this is
ambiguous: "I have 'plans to leave" means that I am planning to leave
and "I have plans to • leave " means that I have some
plans/diagrams/drawings that I have to leave. The latter version could not
be described as contrastive or emphatic. In fact, there are many examples
similar to it.

Perhaps the best rule to give is that the tonic syllable will tend to
occur on the last lexical word in the tone-unit, but may be placed earlier
in the tone-unit if there is a word there with greater importance to what is
being said. This can quite often happen as a result of the last part of the
tone-unit being already "given" (i.e. something which has already been
mentioned or is completely predictable), for example "'Here's that book
you asked me to bring (The fact that you asked me to bring it is not new.)
another example can be "I've got to take the dog for a walk" (`For a walk'
is by far the most probable thing to follow `I've got to take the dog'; if the
sentence ended with `to the vet' the tonic syllable would probably be
`vet'.)

In Britain, the most important work on the placement of tonic

stress is Halliday (1967); his term for this is `tonicity', and he adopts
the widely-used linguistic term `marked' for tonicity that deviates from
the norm. There are two types of tonicity: marked tonicity and
unmarked tonicity. When the tonic stress is carried by a lexical word
and it occurs in the final position, tonicity in this case is unmarked,
e.g. "She was wearing a red dress". Other than that, whether the tonic
stress is carried by a lexical or grammatical word and whether it
occurs in the final position or not, tonicity is marked, e.g. "You
mustn't talk so loudly".

The grammatical function of intonation

It is usual to illustrate the grammatical function by inventing

sentences which when written are ambiguous, and whose ambiguity can
only be removed by using differences of intonation. A typical example is
the sentence "Those who sold quickly made a profit". This can be said in
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at least two different ways: 'Those who 'sold quickly made a profit and
'Those who sold quickly made a profit. The difference caused by the
placement of the tone-unit boundary is seen to be equivalent to giving
two different paraphrases of the sentences. The former means that a
profit was made by those who sold quickly, while the latter means that a
profit was quickly made by those who sold.

Let us look further at the role of tone-unit boundaries, and the link
between the tone-unit and units of grammar. There is a strong tendency
for tone-unit boundaries to occur at boundaries between grammatical
units of higher order than words; it is extremely common to find a tone
unit boundary at a sentence boundary, as in: " I 'wont have any tea I
'dont like it ." In sentences with a more complex structure, tone-unit
boundaries are often found at phrase and clause boundaries as well, as in:
" In France where farms tend to be smaller the 'subsidies are 'more im
portant." It is very unusual to find a tone-unit boundary at a place where
the only grammatical boundary is between words. It would, for example,
sound distinctly odd to have a tone-unit boundary between an article and
a following noun, or between auxiliary and main verbs if they are
adjacent.

Tone-unit boundary placement can indicate grammatical structure to

the listener and we can find minimal pairs such as the following:"The
Con'servatives who like the pro • posal are pleased and "The Con
servatives who like the pro • posal are pleased." The former example is
a restrictive clause that implies that only some Conservatives like the
proposal, while the latter example is a non-restrictive clause that implies
that all the Conservatives like it.

Another component of intonation that can be said to have

grammatical significance is the choice of tone on the tonic syllable. One
example that is very familiar is the use of a rising tone with questions.
Many languages have the possibility of changing a statement into a
question simply by changing the tone from falling to rising. In fact, this
is not used very much in the RP pronunciation, where questions are
usually grammatically marked. Thus the sentence "The price is going
up" can be said as a statement like this:" The price is going up", (the
tonic stress could equally well be on `up'). It would be quite acceptable
in some dialects of English (e.g. many varieties of American English) to
ask a question like this: (Why do you want to buy it now?) The price is
going up. But speakers in England would be more likely to ask the
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question like this: (Why do you want to buy it now?) Is the price going
up . It is by no means true that a rising tone is always used for questions
in English; it is quite usual, for example, to use a falling tone with
questions beginning with one of the "wh-question-words" like `what',
`which', `when', etc., for example, 'Where did you 'park the car . The fall
tone in the previous example is certainly not obligatory, and a rise is
quite often heard in such a question.

The intonation of question-tags (e.g. `isn't it', `can't he', `won't they',
etc.) is often quoted as a case of a difference in meaning being due to the
difference between falling and rising tone. In the following example, the
question-tag is `aren't they'; when it has a falling tone, as in " They 'are
'coming on Tuesday arent they , the implication is said to be that the
speaker is comparatively certain that the information is correct, and
simply expects the listener to provide confirmation, while the rising tone
in " They 'are 'coming on Tuesday arent they " is said to indicate a lesser
degree of certainty, so that the question-tag, functions more like a
request for information. The difference illustrated here could reasonably
be said to be as much attitudinal as grammatical. Certainly there is
overlap between these two functions.

The discourse function of intonation

If we think of linguistic analysis as usually being linked to the

sentence as the maximum unit of grammar, then the study of discourse
attempts to look at the larger contexts in which sentences occur. For
example, consider the four sentences in the following:

A: Have you got any free time this morning?

B: l might have later on if that meeting's off.
A: They were talking about putting it later.
B: You can't be sure.
Each sentence could be studied in isolation and be analyzed in terms of
grammatical construction lexical content and so on. But it is obvious that
the sentences form part of some larger act of conversational interaction
between two speakers; the sentences contain several references that
presuppose shared knowledge (e.g. `that meeting' implies that both
speakers know which meeting is being spoken about), and in some cases
the meaning of a sentence can only be correctly interpreted in the light of
knowledge of what has preceded it in the conversation (e.g. `You can't
be sure').

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 If we consider how intonation may be studied in relation to
discourse, we can identify two main areas: one of them is the use of
intonation to focus the listener's attention on aspects of the message that
are most important, and the other is concerned with the regulation of
conversational behaviour. Light shall be shed on these in turn.

In the case of "attention focusing", the most obvious use has already
been described: this is the placing of tonic stress on the appropriate
syllable of one particular word in the tone-unit. In many cases it is easy
to demonstrate that the tonic stress is placed on the word that is in some
sense the "most important", as in " She went to Scotland ". Sometimes it
seems more appropriate to describe tonic stress placement in terms of
"information content": the more predictable a word's occurrence is in a
given context, the lower its information content is and tonic stress will
tend to be placed on words with high information content, for example,
"I've got to the dog to the vet " The word `vet' is less predictable (has a
higher information content) than 'walk'.

We can see at least two other ways in which intonation can assist in
focusing attention. One way is that the tone chosen can indicate whether
the tone-unit in which it occurs is being used to present new information
or to refer to information which is felt to be already possessed by speaker
and hearer. For example, in the following sentence:" 'Since the last time
we met when we had that 'huge dinner I've been on a diet ". The first
two tone-units present information which is not something new and
unknown to the listener, while the final tone-unit which carries a falling
tone presents new information. Writers on discourse intonation have
proposed that the falling tone indicates new information while rising
(including falling-rising) tones indicate "shared" or "given" information.
Another way in which intonation can assist in focusing attention is
intonational subordination; we can signal that a particular tone-unit is of
comparatively low importance and as a result give correspondingly
greater importance to adjacent tone-units. For example, in a typical
conversational pronunciation of " The Japa nese for some reason or
other drive on the left like us ", the tone units "for some reason or other"
and "like us" might be treated as intonationally subordinate. The
prosodic characteristics marking this are usually (i) a drop to a lower part
of the pitch range ("low key"), (ii) increased speed, (iii) narrower range
of pitch and (iv) lower loudness, relative to the non-subordinate tone-
unit(s). The use of these components has the result that the subordinate

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tone-units are less easy to hear. Native speakers can usually still
understand what is said through guessing at inaudible or unrecognizable
words on the basis of their knowledge of what is being talked about;
foreign learners of English, on the other hand, having in general less
"common ground" or shared knowledge with the speaker, often find that
these subordinate tone-units, with their parenthetic style, cause serious
difficulties in understanding.
We now turn to the second main area of intonational discourse
function, the regulation of conversational behaviour. Intonation is also
important in the conversational interaction of two or more speakers.
Most of the research on this has been on conversational interaction of a
rather restricted kind, such as between doctor and patient, teacher and
pupil or between the various speakers in court cases. In such material it
is comparatively easy to identify what each speaker is actually doing in
speaking - for example, questioning, challenging, advising, encouraging,
disapproving, etc.
In a more general way, it can be seen that speakers use various
prosodic components to indicate to others that they have finished
speaking, that another person is expected to speak, that a particular type
of response is required, and so on. It seems that key (the part of the pitch
range used) is important in signalling information about conversational
interaction. We can observe many examples in non-linguistic behaviour
of the use of signals to regulate turn-taking. Intonation, in conjunction
with "body language" such as eye-contact, facial expression, gestures
and head-turning, is used for similar purposes in speech, as well as for
establishing or confirming the status of the participants in a conversation.
Conclusion
In conclusion, intonation performs various functions in language. It
has attitudinal, accentual, grammatical, discourse functions. Intonation
helps us to convey the emotional attitude of the speaker and this is called
the attitudinal function of intonation. Intonation also helps to produce the
effect of prominence on syllables that need to be perceived as stressed,
especially through the placing of tonic stress on a particular syllable to
indicate that this syllable is the most important one in the tone unit. This
is called the accentual function of intonation. Another important function
of intonation is the grammatical function that is concerned with using the
information contained in the intonation, such as the placement of
boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences, to be able to recognize

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the grammar and syntactic structure of what is being said. Additionally,
intonation can signal to the listener what is to be taken as "new"
information and what is already "given" and can also suggest when the
speaker is indicating some sort of contrast or link with material in
another tone-unit. Such functions are examples of intonation's discourse
function. In the Hallidayan analysis of intonation, the division of an
utterance into tone units is called tonality, while the options in the
placement of the tonic stress are referred to as tonicity.

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Works-cited list

Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th ed. USA:

Blackwell publishing, 1980.

Gimson, A.C. An introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London:

Edward Arnold, 1970.

Roach, Peter. English Phonetics and Phonology. 3rd ed. UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.

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