INTONATION

INTONATION
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INTONATION
TONALITY

INTRODUCTORY ACTIVITY
Listen to the following text. Try to divide it according to where you think there should
be some kind of punctuation.

I can never guess the weather right if I wear a warm shirt the weather´s hot if I wear cool
clothes there´s a cold wind when I don´t take my umbrella it rains if I take my umbrella does it
rain of course not then I leave it on the bus oh well we all have our weaknesses I guess

TONALITY
The first matter a speaker has to decide when planning an utterance is the division of
spoken material into chunks. There will be an intonation pattern associated with each chunk.
These chunks are known as intonation phrases. Other names are: word groups, tone groups,
intonation groups. Each intonation phrase in an utterance has its own intonation pattern or tune.

-How does the speaker break the material up into intonation phrases?
-Where do the boundaries between successive intonation phrases go?
-What determines the number of words that go into a single intonation phrase?

To a large extent, the answers are a matter of common sense. Essentially, the intonation
structure reflects the grammatical structure. An intonation break or tone group division
generally, but not necessarily corresponds to a syntactic boundary. We regularly place tone
group divisions between successive sentences, usually between successive clauses, sometimes
between successive phrases and occasionally between successive words.
Tone groups normally reflect a single idea or thought.
The presence or absence of tone group divisions and their location signals to the hearer
the syntactic structure of the sentence. Sometimes, this structure is potentially ambiguous and
the tonality can disambiguate it.

Example of disambiguation:

A: Do you like pawpaw?

B: I´m sorry, / I don´t know. (=I´ve never tried it)

/aIm sQrI /aI d@Unt n@U /

B: I´m sorry, / I don´t / no. (=I don´t like it)

/aIm sQrI /aI d@Unt / n@U /
TONALITY ACTIVITIES
TONICITY
TONICITY

Speakers use intonation to highlight some words as important for the meaning they wish
to convey. These are the words on which the speaker focuses the hearer´s attention. To
highlight an important word we accent it. We give a change in pitch or pitch movement to the
stressed syllable of that word.

Which words are to have attention drawn to them by being accented? In particular,
where is the speaker to place the last accent, the nucleous or tonic syllable within the intonation
phrase or tone group? The nucleous is the most important accent in the tone group. It indicates
the end of the focused part of the material. In terms of pitch, it is marked out by being the place
where the pitch change or pitch movement for the nuclear tone begins.

Words can be divided into two broad categories: content words and function words.
Content words are the key words of a sentence. They are the important words that carry the
meaning or sense. Content words are nouns, adjectives, most verbs and most adverbs: words
that have meaning, such as is found in dictionaries. Function words are not as important. They
are small, simple words that make the sentence correct grammatically. They give the sentence
its correct form or 'structure', but they do not carry semantic meaning in themselves. Function
words are pronouns, prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, etc.
If you remove the structure words from a sentence, you will probably still understand
the sentence. If you remove the content words from a sentence, you will not understand the
sentence: the sentence will not have sense or meaning.
Generally speaking, we accent content words but not function words. Hence the
nucleous (which is one kind of accent, one that bears a change in pitch) is placed on the last
content word in the tone group.
The way to select a suitable place for the nucleous, therefore, is to start from the end of
the tone group and work back.

Nucleous:

-New information.
-Contrast

The placement of the nucleous has to do also with the distribution of the information in
the utterance and some other times with the presence of contrast. New information will be
likely to be of more importance than given information. Hence, as a general rule, it is the new
information that will normally bear the nucleous. If there is contrast, it is the word that shows
the contrast that will carry the nucleous or tonic syllable.
STRESS AND ACCENT

These two terms, which belong to the specific jargon of Phonetics and Phonology, are
likely to bring up not little confusion, perhaps because there is a tendency to use them
indistinctly, as if they made reference to the same linguistic phenomenon, and also because of
the mental interference (for speakers of Spanish) of the word acento, by which is meant, among
other things, acento prosódico, ie., the one that classifies Spanish words into agudas, graves
and esdrújulas.

According to Ortiz-Lira, most authors share the view that stress and accent are not
strictly phonetic, but actually phonological concepts. That is, they do no merely refer to the
production and perception of loudness, or distinctiveness (= prominence) in parts of speech, but
they have an effect upon meaning. This is the reason why they are phonological rather than
phonetic notions. In this sense, stress is a phonological feature of the word that shows
prominence at word level in the form of loudness; accent is a phonological feature of the
utterance, which shows prominence through some kind of pitch change. Consequently, a given
word may be stressed without necessarily being accented.

* For example, at word level, stress establishes a meaningful difference between ‘concert and
con’cert.
* At the level of the utterance, although the word be’lieve pronounced in isolation bears a stress
on its second syllable, in the expression There are no ‘buiscuits left, I be’lieve, it is stressed but
not accented: here the word buiscuits also bears a change in pitch, and is therefore more
prominent, as the speaker choses to make it stand out as the most important piece of
information in his utterance, and thus becomes the only accented word in it.

Following a similar criterion, J.D. O’Connor states: “…words are accented when they
are important to the meaning in a particular situation and not accented when they are not
specially important. (…) every accented word must carry a stress. But stress alone does not
necessarily imply accent” (O’Connor J.D., Arnold G.F., Intonation of Colloquial English,
London, 1973). That is the reason why, in their description, accent belongs to what they call
head and nucleus, whereas pre-heads and tails may have stressed syllables but not accented
words.

A.C. Gimson defines stress from a purely phonetic or phonemic point of view, as the
amount of breath effort and muscular energy spent on the pronunciation of a given syllable.
Stress is one of the factors that account for prominence, i.e., it helps making a given syllable
within a word acoustically more prominent than its neighbours, in other words that syllable is
made to stand out by the speaker and perceived as such by the listener. This author uses the
term accent in a rather indistinct way “The syllable or syllables of a word which stand out from
the remainder are said to be accented, to receive accent” (Gimson, A.C., An Introduction to the
Pronunciation of English, Third Edition, Edward Arnold, London, 1980); for Gimson, then,
accent is a manifestation of stress.
STRUCTURE OF THE INTONATION PHRASE OR TONE GROUP

We are planning to fly to Italy

________________________
TAIL
All the syllables that come after the nucleous are called TAIL.

ONSET AND HEAD

If an intonation phrase or tone group contains an accent (= a syllable or more belonging
to important, lexical words and bearing stress), in the part before the nucleous, the first (or
only) such accented syllable is called ONSET. The part extending from the onset to the last
syllable before the nucleous is called the HEAD.

PREHEAD
The part before the onset is called PREHEAD. By definition, the prehead contains no
accented syllables (= syllables belonging to important words, signalled by differences in pitch,
even when it may occasionally contain stressed syllables).
There may be a prehead without head, if the first accented syllable (= fully stressed
syllable belonging to an important word) of the whole intonation phrase is the nucleous (=
syllable containing pitch change during its pronunciation).

We´re in Italy.
___________
If an IP (intonation phrase) contains no accented syllables before the nucleous, there is no head.
If it contains no unaccented syllables before the first accent (onset or nucleous), there is no
prehead.

Fly to Italy
_________
The boundaries of prehead, head, nucleous and tail do not necessarily coincide with word
boundaries, although they always coincide with syllable boundaries.

Although every IP contains a nucleous, not all IPs contain a prehead, a head or a tail.

Fly
___
ACTIVITY

TONE

Listen to this conversation and notice how the voice moves up and down.
1-………………………………………… 6-…………………………………………

2-………………………………………… 7-…………………………………………

3-………………………………………… 8-…………………………………………

4-………………………………………… 9-…………………………………………

5-………………………………………… 10-…………………………………………
ACTIVITY 12
THE FUNCTIONS OF INTONATION

Intonation makes it easier for the listener to understand what the speaker is trying to
convey. The ways in which intonation does this are very complex, and many suggestions have
been made for ways of isolating different functions. Among the most often proposed are the
following:

ATTITUDINAL FUNCTION

Intonation enables us to express emotions and attitudes.

ACCENTUAL FUNCTION

Intonation helps to produce the effect of prominence on syllables that need to be

perceived as stressed, and in particular the placing of tonic stress (= nucleus / change in pitch)
on a particular syllable marks out the word to which it belongs as the most important in the
intonation phrase or tone group, as regards the meaning it carries.

GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION

The listener is better able to recognize the grammar and syntactic structure of what is
being said by using the information contained in the intonation: for example, such things as the
placement of boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences, the difference between
questions and statements and the use of grammatical subordination may be indicated.

DISCOURSE FUNCTION

Intonation can signal to the listener what is to be taken as “new” information and what
is already “given” (= that information which the speakers considers is already known to the
listener), it can suggest when the speaker is making some sort of contrast or link with material
in another intonation phrase or tone group and, in conversation, it can convey to the listener
what kind of response is expected.

PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION

Intonation helps us organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, memorize and
perform.

INDEXICAL FUNCTION

Intonation may act as a marker of personal or social identity. (What makes mothers
sound like mothers, lovers like lovers, lawyers like lawyers, clergymen like clergymen,
newsreaders like newsreaders, officials like officials, etc.)
TONE IN MORE DETAIL
BIBLIOGRAPHY

-Bradford, B. (1988). Intonation in Context. Cambridge: CUP.

-Gimson, A.C., (1975) A Practical Course of English Pronunciation, London,

Edward Arnold (publishers).

-Gimson, A. C., (1965) Introduction to the pronunciation of English, London,

Edward Arnold (Publishers).

-Hancock, Mark, (2004), English Pronunciation in Use, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

-Kingdom, R. (1958). The Groundwork of English Stress. London: Longman,

Green & Co. Ltd

-Mortimer, C. (1985). Elements of Pronunciation. Intensive practice for

intermediate and more advanced students, Cambridge: C.U.P.

-O’Connor J. D. and G. F. Arnold, (1973) Intonation of Colloquial English,

Essex, Longman Group Limited.

-Ortiz-Lira, H., (1998) Word stress and sentence accent. Santiago. Universidad
Metropolitana de Ciencias Pedagógicas. Colección Monografías Temáticas.

-Roach, Peter, (1995) English Phonetics and Phonology, 2nd. Edition,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

-Wells, J.C., (2006). English Intonation. An Introduction, Cambridge University

Press.