Suprasegmentals
9 Intonation: Tune
John M. Levis
- To familiarize teachers with how intonation is signaled in English
- To enhance teachers’ ability to teach intonation to students
- To demonstrate why intonation is important in promoting intelligible speech
- To introduce teachers to how intonation adds meaning to different grammatical structures
- To provide exercises for producing and perceiving final intonation
9.1 What is intonation?
Intonation refers to the “distinctive use of patterns of pitch, or melody” to communicate meaning in a language (David Crystal, reported in Chun, 2002, p. 4). Intonation, in this definition, involves the use of pitch to communicate a speaker’s stance toward what they are saying. Intonation can also be defined in terms of distinct linguistic categories. Final intonation refers to rising vs. falling final pitch or combinations of rising and falling pitch that communicate meaning. Intonation contributes meaning to individual phrases and sentences, but intonation is particularly important at the discourse level (in how the meanings expressed by sentences fit together). For example, when speakers (especially younger speakers) sometimes use frequent rising pitch at the ends of their phrases while they are talking at length about a topic, a phenomenon called Uptalk (Warren, 2016) or Upspeak (Bradford, 1997), they are using this intonation for a discourse purpose. The rising intonation engages listeners and also tells them that the speaker is not yet finished with their narration. In addition, the use of Uptalk can serve as a marker of group identity. Of course, it also can be annoying to some listeners who accuse speakers of talking in questions, even when they are making statements, but the use of Uptalk serves communicative purposes in how some groups of people communicate.
There are many intonation patterns that have been described for English, such as the calling contour, which has a high pitch on the stressed syllable, then steps down to a low pitch at the end of the name (e.g., AlexANder! SUsan! JOhn!) or the children’s chant (Johnny has a girlfriend!), which has a set of pitch steps that almost everyone recognizes as being unpleasantly teasing.
Calling Contour
AlexANder! SUsan! JOhn!
Children’s Chant
Johnny has a girl friend.
These stylized intonation contours were also important for researchers in learning how to describe English intonation (Ladd, 1978; Liberman, 1975), but for learners of English, and for teachers, there are only a few patterns that cover almost everything they need. These patterns include rising, falling, falling-rising, and level intonation. These different patterns can be represented by arrows pointing in the direction that the pitch moves at the end of the spoken sentence. Rising intonation has an upward movement () and falling intonation a downward movement (). Falling-rising combines these two movements, and level intonation has no movement. The intonation expert David Brazil says that l