Phonetics and Phonology (eng507)
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| Topic-086: Intonation Intonation refers (very) simply to the variations in the pitch of a speaker’s voice (fused to conveyor alter meaning but in its broader and more popular sense intonation covers much of the same field as prosody where variations in such things as voice quality, tempo and loudness are included. It is certainly possible to analyze pitch movement (or its acoustic counterpart, fundamental frequency) and find regular patterns that can be described and tabulated. Some experts look for an underlying basic pitch melody (or a small number of melodies) and then describe the factors that cause deviations from these basic melodies. On the other hand, there are experts who have tried to breakdown these pitch patterns into small constituent units such as pitch phonemes and pitch morphemes. The approach most widely used in Britain takes the tone unit as its basic unit and looks at the different pitch possibilities of the various components of the tone unit (the pre-head, head, tonic syllable/nucleus, tail, etc. Intonation is said to convey emotions and attitudes. Other linguistic functions have also been claimed (e.g., grammatical structure and new information – the effect of prominence. Interesting relationships exist in English between intonation and grammar for example, in a few extreme cases a perceived difference in grammatical meaning may depend on the pitch movement. Download 1.01 Mb. Share with your friends:
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