Summery- Phonetics and Phonology 3

Intonation is the linguistic use of pitch in utterances. We also specify pitch as the
essence of intonation, and in this way we make intonation distinct from the broader
concept of paralanguage. Intonation does have both a linguistic and a para linguistic
dimension. The linguistic dimension concerns the message itself: how many pieces of
information there are; what information is new, whether the message is complete or
incomplete, whether the speaker is telling you something or asking you, or whether the
speaker is turning to a new tonic or finishing off an old one. The paralinguistic
dimension concerns the messenger rather than the message: the speaker’s state of
mind, their degree of politeness and their effort to associate or dissociate from you. But
paralanguage involves not only pitch, but also volume, tempo and voice quality, indeed
all the vocal effects that are available within a given language.
If a language uses pitch variation to differentiate between words, we call that language
a tone language.
Halliday introduced the notion of a trio of systems operating in English intonation:
tonality is the system by which a stretch of spoken text is segmented into a series of
discrete units of intonation which correspond to the speaker’s perception of pieces (or
‘chunks’) of information; tonicity is the system by which an individual, discrete, unit of
intonation is shown to have a prominent word which indicates the focus of information;
and tone is the system of contrasting pitch movements in each unit of intonation,
which, among other roles, identifies the status of the information, e.g. major, minor or
incomplete.
Intonation is conventional and we know what different patterns mean that we can make
the comment about not liking the ‘way’ something was said.