CHAPTER 8: INTONATION

1. Pitch, intonation, and tone languages

1.1. Pitch
Pitch refers to human perception, i.e. whether one perceives sounds as ‘high’ or ‘low’. The most important
physical factor in determining pitch is the frequency (i.e. speed of vibration) of the vocal folds; in general terms,
the higher the frequency, the higher the perceived pitch, and vice versa. Pitch variation has an important role to
play in communication, supplying meaning additional to that conveyed by the segmental phonemes (Roach,
2009).
1.2. Intonation
Intonation can be defined as the use of pitch and other suprasegmental features to convey discourse-level
meaning.
Example:
a. “You’re a werewolf?”  rising pitch indicates a yes/no question
b. “I’m a werewolf.”  falling pitch indicates a statement
c. “A werewolf? I thought you were a vampire!”  a complex rise-fall-rise pattern signals surprise
In each case, the word werewolf receives a distinctive pitch pattern. However, the lexical item referred to remains
the same.
Linguists generally agree on the following basic principles of intonation:
 All languages, including tone languages, have intonation.
 Intonation is principally the variation of pitch, but also prominence, over a stretch of speech.
 Intonation has four functions.
o The structural function signals the grammatical or structural role of an utterance, determining, for
example, whether it is a question, a request, or an instruction.
o The accentual function affects the prominence of a syllable, and thus plays a role in focusing stress on
particular words in connected speech.
o The attitudinal function conveys the speakers' personal orientations towards what they say, or gives us
clues about how the speakers feel – whether they are uninterested, excited, or ironic, for example.
o And the discourse function marks the turn taking processes in an exchange between speakers.
 The set of intonation patterns, or contours, is limited and can be fully determined, but linguists are not in full
agreement about the actual number of different contours
 In order to analyze intonation, continuous speech can be broken down into smaller units, but there are
different conventions about how to determine these units.

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 1.3. Tone languages
Pitch variation has an important role to play in communication, supplying meaning additional to that conveyed
by the segmental phonemes. We can distinguish two significant ways in which pitch functions, namely (lexical)
tone and intonation. In many languages, it is possible to use pitch differences to distinguish the dictionary
meaning of words. This function of pitch is known as tone and such languages are termed tone languages. Tone
languages may make use of different numbers of pitch levels. Two levels (high and low) or three (high, mid and
low) are common.
Languages like these, which use a tone system of two or three significant pitch levels, are called register tone
languages. In the Far East, contour tone languages are more common. These chiefly employ falling and rising
pitches; examples are to be found in the languages of China, including the most widely spoken variety, Mandarin
Chinese.
1.4. Intonation variation
Most European languages do not use pitch to indicate dictionary meaning. For instance, you can say the English
word yes on a number of different pitch patterns:

Yet it continues to mean yes and can’t be made to mean anything else. In English, pitch variation is confined to
intonation.
Intonation tunes operate over an extent greater than a single word, usually over complete clauses or sentences.
Intonation is crucial to human communication, supplying types of meaning additional to what is supplied by the
words themselves. Think how often you hear people come out with statements like: ‘It wasn’t so much what he
said – it was more the way he said it.’

2. English intonation patterns and some functions of English tones

Intonation Meaning Examples & explanations
patterns
Fall (\) Neutrality or finality A: Have you seen Ann? B has no interest in
B: \No continuing with that topic
of conversation
A: Do you know what the longest B does not know and is not
balloon flight was? expecting to be told.
B: \No

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 Rise (/) More to follow A: Excuse me. B’s reply means ‘what do
B: /Yes you want?’
A: Do you know John Smith? B’s reply invites A to
B: /yes continue.
Fall-rise \/ Limited agreement or A: I’ve heard that it’s a good B would not completely
response with reservations school. agree with what A said.
B: \/Yes
A: It’s not really an expensive
book, is it?
B: \/No
Rise-fall /\ Strong feelings of approval, A: You wouldn’t do an awful thing B strongly disagrees.
disapproval or surprise like that, would you?
B: /\No
A: Isn’t the view lovely? B strongly agrees.
B: /\Yes
A: I think you said it was the best B is surprised.
so far.
B: /\Yes
Level _ Feeling of saying something Teacher: David _Beckham A teacher calling the
routine, uninteresting or Student: _Yes names of students from a
boring register
A: Do you suffer from any serious A is asked a series of
illness? routine questions to apply
B: _No for an insurance policy.
A: Is your eyesight defective?
B: _No

We usually find that completed statements and commands involve falling tones, whereas yes–no questions and
introductory non-final clauses more typically have rising nuclei, e.g.
Utterance type Default pattern
Statements Fanny carefully repeated the in\structions.
Delia’s bought a turkey from some guy in \Swindon.
It’s really well worth a \visit.

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 A \month or so ago.
Commands \Tell me about it.
Shut the \window.
Stack the books on those \shelves.
Wh-questions What’s the best way to roast a \goose?
Tag questions What’s your \name?
(confirmation questions) Where do you \live?
What were you thinking of \doing this evening?
How can we possibly pay this \bill?
Who on earth can we ask to \help?
Peter’s seen a \jaguar, \hasn’t he?
Yes-No questions Will it be ready by /Friday?
Tag questions Delia’s bought a turkey from some guy in /Swindon?
(true questions) It’s really well worth a /visit?
Has Prue booked her flight to /Paris?
Peter’s seen a \jaguar, /hasn’t he?
Non-final clauses Although Oliver promised to /help (he let us \down).
Meet us on /Thursday. (And then we can sort it out later.)
Don’t /worry. (It’ll be alright.)
After having watched the /play something I didn’t do very /willingly I’m
convinced
of Marguerite’s \talent.
Lists We’ve invited /Delia, /Fanny, /Jamie, and all the \neighbours.
You can have /pasta, /rice, boiled po/tatoes or \chips.
A /book, a /pen, and ten \minidiscs.
A few meanings have been suggested for the five tones introduced, but each tone may have many more such
meanings. Moreover, no particular tone has a unique ‘privilege of occurrence’ in a particular context.
3. The tone unit
We can normally break connected speech down into utterances, i.e. units that begin and end with a clear pause.
While utterances may consist of only one syllable, such as yes or no, they are normally much longer, as in The
other day, while I was in town, I met Chris, who I hadn't seen for a couple of weeks. Within an utterance, we can
sometimes also identify smaller units, over which a single intonation contour extends. Such a stretch of speech
we call a tone unit, or tone group For example, the simple question (i) below, the longer question (ii), and the
statement (iii) are all utterances.
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 i When?
ii When did you say you would arrive?
iii When he finally arrived, he discovered his friends had already left.
(i) and (ii) each consist of a single tone unit whereas (iii) is made up of two tone units. A tone unit, then, can
extend over a stretch of speech as short as a single syllable, as in (i), or over a much longer stretch of speech, as
in (ii).
An utterance may be spoken as a single tone unit or it may be broken into several tone units. The way the utterance
is divided into tone units depends partly on the tempo of the speech. The faster a person speaks, the longer and
fewer the tone units; the slower the speech, the shorter and more numerous the tone units. We say it depends
partly on the tempo of speech because speakers can, to a large degree, control the ‘chunking’ the way they want
to.
Within a tone unit, each stressed syllable has a minor pitch increase, but there is one syllable in which this pitch
increase is more significant. The syllable that carries the major pitch change is called the tonic syllable. For
example, in the following sentence:

the elements marked with a ‘ are stressed, but the major pitch increase is on teacher, which is marked with an
asterisk.
A tonic syllable carries not only a tone but also a type of stress that will be called tonic stress.
e.g. \/John ǀ is it /you (Syllable carrying a tone is underlined)
The tone unit has a place in a range of phonological units that are in hierarchical relationship:
SPEECH >> UTTERANCE >> TONE UNIT >> FOOT >> SYLLABLE >> PHONEME
 Speech consists of a number of utterances.
 Each utterance consists of one or more tone units.
 Each tone unit consists of one or more feet.
 Each foot consists of one or more syllables.
 Each syllable consists of one or more phonemes.
The structure of the tone unit
Each symbol tone unit has one and only one tonic syllable; this mean that the tonic syllable is an obligatory
component of the tone unit.
 The tonic syllable (TS), or nucleus, is the last prominent syllable in a tone unit.
 The head (H) is that part of a tone unit which extends from the first stressed syllable up to, but not
including, the tonic syllable. If there is no stressed syllable before the tonic syllable, there is no head.

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  The pre-head (PH) is composed of all the unstressed syllables in a tone unit preceding the first stressed
syllable. Thus pre-heads are found when there is no head (i.e. no stressed syllable preceding the tonic
syllable) or when there is a head.
 The tail (T) comprises all the syllables that occur between the tonic syllable and the end of the tone unit.
We can mark off the four components of tone units with a vertical line and summarize tone unit structure as
follows:
(pre-head) (head) tonic (tail)
syllable
Or more briefly, as
(PH) (H) TS (T)

(a) ˈgive me \ˈthose

H TS

(b) ˈBill ˈcalled to ˈgive \ˈthese

me
H TS

(c) in an \ˈhour
PH TS

(d) in a ˈlittle ˈless than an \ˈhour

PH H TS

(e) \ˈlook at it
TS T

(f) /ˈwhat did you ˈsay

TS T

(g) \ˈboth of them were ˈhere

TS T