Introduction

Intonation has been described as ‘the music of speech’. Technically, it is best defined as the meaningful use of pitch changes in speech. This unit looks at the nature of those pitch changes (or tones) and the kinds of meanings that they express. And, because pitch changes occur on stressed words, we also look at the way that certain words are assigned prominence in spoken language.

Tasks

1 Chunking

When we write, we write in sentences. But when we speak, we segment the stream of speech into meaningful ‘chunks’; these chunks are called intonational phrases, or tone units. They are typically signalled by pausing and by changes of pitch. Here is a transcript of a spoken narrative. Can you tell where the divisions between the tone units are likely to fall? (The first few have been done for you.)

Okay | It started um summer [laughing] of nineteen [laughing]| summer of nineteen ninety-six |Just like any other summer | I went to Spain with my family | and for the months of June and July and August and I was sixteen. I was starting to discover kind of girls and stuff and um we really didn’t do much me and friends there. We just … When we got bored we’d go to this river and uh just chill at the river and sometimes like cool off in the river and stuff and there were usually people our age there just chilling …

2 Tone units

The tone unit functions as a means of ‘packaging’ information in spoken discourse. Say these pairs of utterances aloud, pausing slightly where marked (|), and see if you can distinguish the differences of meaning in each:

• a They collect Swedish furniture and ceramics.

• They collect Swedish furniture | and ceramics.

• b The passengers who were wearing seat-belts | were unhurt.

• The passengers | who were wearing seat-belts | were unhurt.

• c Drivers who drink | often have accidents.

• Drivers who drink often | have accidents.

• d She went to answer the phone hopefully.

• She went to answer the phone | hopefully.

• e We prefer dancing to music.

• We prefer dancing | to music.

• f I didn’t marry him because of his parents.