Topic-158: Intonation as a Suprasegmental Feature In simple sense, intonation refers to the variations in the pitch of a speaker’s voice used to conveyor alter meaning (at sentence level. In its broader and more popular sense, it is used to cover much the same field as prosody, where various features such as voice quality, tempo and loudness are also included. It is a term frequently used in the study of suprasegmental phonology, referring to the distinctive use of patterns of pitch, or melody and the study of intonation is sometimes called intonology. Experts have suggested several ways of analyzing intonation. In some approaches, the pitch patterns are described as contours and analyzed in terms of levels of pitch as pitch phonemes and morphemes while in others, the patterns are described as tone units or tone groups which are further analyzed as contrasts of nuclear tone, tonicity, etc. The three variables of pitch range, height and direction are generally distinguished. Some approaches, especially within pragmatics, operate with a much broader notion than that of the tone unit intonational phrasing is a structured hierarchy of the intonational constituents in conversation. A formal category of intonational phrase is also sometimes recognized which is an utterance span dominated by boundary tones.
