What is intonation?

According to O’Connor and Arnold, English intonation refers to “the pitch

patterns of spoken English, the speech tunes or melodies, the musical features
of English”. This means that we can divide the speech into intonation phrases
(tonality), we can highlight certain words in an utterance according to its
importance (tonicity) or we can distinguish a determined pitch movement over a
whole unit (tone). Intonation has got several functions which can:

 Express the speaker’s attitudes or emotions by choosing the tone -

attitudinal function.

 Identify grammatical structures in speech, similar to punctuation in writing

– grammatical function.

 Highlight the most important information of the message by placing the

nucleus appropriately using tonicity – accentual function.

 Sequence the utterances in a spoken discourse – cohesive function.

Intonation in deep Phonetics III

 Organise the speech in order to be understood – psychological

function.

 Characterize personal intonation as a marker of identity – indexical

function.

There are several elements of English intonation which we can also refer to as
parts of an utterance:

Nucleus or tonic syllable: it is the stressed syllable of the last accented word
which carries the most important information of the utterance. The tone is
applied to the nucleus.

Tail: is the syllable that follows the nucleus. It can contain stressed syllables but
never an accented one.

Head: it is the first accented syllable with other stressed or unstressed syllables
before the nucleus.
Pre-head: it consists of the unstressed syllables before the head or before the
nucleus if there isn’t a head.

Tone groups

A tone group is a grouping of tunes all conveying the same attitude on the part
of the speaker. The tunes inside a tone group also have one or more features in
common. So we can say that the tone groups are the different pitch
combinations and we can distinguish ten of them:

1. The low drop: high head + low fall

2. The high drop: high head + high fall
3. The take-off: low head + low rise
4. The low bounce: high head + low rise
5. The switchback: falling head + fall-rise
6. The long jump: rising head + high fall
7. The high bounce: high head + high rise
8. The in
Intonation Jackknife:
deep high head + fall-rise Phonetics III
9. The high dive: high fall + low rise
10. The terrace: high head + mid level

Bibliography:

O’Connor, J. and Arnold, G (1973). Intonation of Colloquial English. London:

Longman.