Topic-160: Explaining Functions of Intonation While discussing the functions of intonation, another approach is to concentrate on its role in conversational discourse. This involves such aspects as indicating whether the particular thing being said constitutes new information or old (in sentence, for example. It further creates the regulation of turn- taking in conversation, the establishment of dominance and the elicitation of cooperative responses as well. As with the signaling of attitudes, it seems that though analysts concentrate on pitch movements there are many other prosodic factors being used to create these effects. It is also important to note here that much less work has been done on the intonation of languages other than English. It seems that all languages have something that can be identified as intonation (there can be many differences between among languages. It is, therefore, a potential area to be studied and explored further. One reason for intonation not being well explored is because of the different descriptive frameworks used by different analysts for studying intonation cross-linguistically. Even it is claimed that tone languages also have intonation and that it is superimposed upon the tones themselves. Such a claim creates especially difficult problems of analysis.
