#intonation

Thanks for the poll request, anonymous! Keep 'em coming, folks.

Intonation - the contrastive use of pitch in speech.

Emotional - Intonation’s most obvious role is to express attitudinal meaning – sarcasm, surprise, reserve, impatience, delight, shock, anger, interest, and thousands of other semantic nuances.

Grammatical - Intonation helps to identify grammatical structure in speech, performing a role similar to punctuation. Units such as clause and sentence (§16) often depend on intonation for their spoken identity, and several specific contrasts, such as question/statement, make systematic use of it.

Informational - Intonation helps draw attention to what meaning is given and what is new in an utterance. The word carrying the most prominent tone in a contour signals the part of an utterance that the speaker is treating as new information: I’ve got a new pen, I bought three books.

Textual - Intonation helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere. In radio news-reading, paragraphs of information can be shaped through the use of pitch. In sports commentary, changes in prosody reflect the progress of the action.

Psychological - Intonation helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize. Most people would find a sequence of ten numbers (4, 7, 3, 8, 2, 6, 4, 8, 1, 5) difficult to recall; the task is made easier by using intonation to chunk the sequence into two units (4, 7, 3, 8, 2 / 6, 4, 8, 1, 5).

Indexical - Intonation, along with other prosodic features, is an important marker of personal or social identity. Lawyers, preachers, newscasters, sports commentators, army sergeants, and several other occupations are readily identified through their distinctive prosody.

This video explores how emotions affect Chinese tones. You'll learn the common mistakes learners make and how tones are actually produced in different emotional states.

Oh my god I'm sorry my "fully not a phonologist" is showing, but I've lumped together these papers because they're about phonology at the level of something bigger than a phoneme - tones, syllables, and prosody / intonation.

Prosodic boundary processing is language-dependent, Shinobu Mizuguchi and Koichi Tateishi. Keywords: prosody, Japanese, English, spontaneous speech, Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT), boundary cues

Tone 3 Sandhi in Mandarin: Productivity and acoustic realization in L1 and L2 speakers, Xiao Dong and Chien-Jer Lin. Keywords: Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi, Phonological Alternations, Second Language Acquisition

Must "big" syllables carry stress in English?, Anya Hogoboom and Lulu Griffin. Keywords: full vowels, closed syllables, stress, English, perception

Accentual phrases in Tagalog intonation and their loose relation to word prosody, Alessa Farinella and Sun-Ah Jun. Keywords: Austronesian languages, Tagalog, intonation, Autosegmental-Metrical Theory, Prosody, Accentual Phrase

How well do you pick up on Russian intonation? Here’s a little teaser from my course on mastering Russian intonation! In this audio snippet, you’ll hear the question: 'Сколько здесь итальянцев?'

Listen closely, then pick the correct answer:

Здесь только пять, а там - сорок человек!

Восемь человек.

Итальянцев пять, а все остальные - французы.

Lingthusiasm Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about tone, intonation, and the combination of the two. We talk about various meanings of intonation, such as question, list, floor-holding, emphasis, enthusiasm, and sarcasm, and how different languages use different shapes of intonation contours for functions like these. We also talk about things languages do with tones, from changing meanings of individual words to indicating grammatical information like negation. Finally, we talk about the many, many options for writing tone and intonation (from highly technical proposals to fun internet creations), how tone interacts with lyrics/melody in songs, and how “high” versus “low” tone is actually a culturally-specific metaphor -- could we start calling tones “thin” and “thick” or “big” and “small” instead?

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language's canonical pronouns. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support. Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original tumblr post on New Internet Grammar question marks from @pervocracy

Formal definitions of tone and intonation from the Routledge handbook

Gender Reveal episode on the social dynamics of pitch and other features with regard to gender

Falling question intonation in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi Creole English

All Things Linguistic post on transfer features of our intonation into writing

‘Tone’ by Moira Yip, for information on prevalence of tone in the worlds languages

The Four Mandarin Chinese Tones

All Things Linguistic post on understanding tone as a non-tone language speaker

Hacking Chinese post ‘7 ways to write Mandarin tones’

Zhao Yuanren/Yuen Ren Chao, such a cool Chinese linguist (he also translated Jabberwocky! and gave his daughter the name Lensey, which contains the only two syllables that are possible in the Chinese language but not actually present in any no Chinese words, thus making her name impossible to write properly in Chinese. Just like, please go read his Wikipedia article.)

Wikipedia entry for Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Wikipedia entry for Chinese tongue twisters

ChinesePod Blog post ‘How to read a Chinese poem with only one sound’

Wikipedia entry for Vietnamese tone

‘Tones in San Juan Quiahije Chatino’ by Emiliana Cruz

‘High Tone Docking in Sierra Juárez Zapotec’ by Lee Bickmore and George Aaron Broadwell

WALS entry for tone

‘The tone system of the Luanyjang dialect of Dinka’ by Bert Remijsen and D. Robert Ladd

‘Tone and intonation: A case study in two Tibetic languages’ by Teo, A., L. Gawne and M. Baese-Berk

HK Magazine post ‘Ask Mr. Know-It-All: How do you sing in a tonal language like Cantonese?’

‘The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical Evidence for Linguistic Relativity’ by S. Dolscheid, S. Shayan, A. Majid, and D. Casasanto

Other relevant Lingthusiasm episodes:

Lingthusiasm episode ‘What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Various vocal fold vibes’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Chitimacha is one of the rare languages which uses rising intonation for statements and falling intonation for questions and commands (Swadesh 1946: 317).

This chart using languages from the World Atlas of Language Structures shows just how infrequent this pattern is in the world’s languages (Gordon 2016: 245).

Interestingly, the nearby Chickasaw language also has this unusual pattern, even though the two languages are unrelated (Gordon 2016: 245).

You can learn all about the sound systems of the world’s languages in the excellent book Phonological typology. (The book is aimed at linguists rather than a general audience. An intro linguistics class is probably a prerequisite for the book.)

References

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2013. The world atlas of language structures online. https://wals.info/.

Gordon, Matthew K. 2016. Phonological typology (Oxford Surveys in Phonology & Phonetics 1). Oxford University Press.