Intonation as a component structure

Generally speaking, intonation helps to determine meaning, gives clues about the attitude of the speaker and how he feels about what he is saying. Intonation indicates what is shared knowledge between the speaker and the listener and what is new information.

There are different approaches to intonation. It can be treated as one or many things.

According to the American school of phoneticians, intonation is pitch. The intonation refers to the way the voice goes up and down in pitch, when we’re speaking. Pitch depends on the rate of vibrations of the vocal cords. The slower the rate is, the lower the pitch is; the higher the rate is, the higher the pitch is. Differences of pitch are used in languages to make differences of meaning. Pitch can be extrahigh, high, mid and low. It can be called a vertical approach to intonation.

Pitch creates tone. There are 4 main tones that have different logical meaning and possess different emotional expression.

tone	logical meaning	emotional expression
fall	finality	categoric tone, sadness, indifference, irritation
rise	lack of finality	doubt, hesitation, warmth, sympathy, surprise
fall-rise	implication	hint
rise-fall	antithesis, contrast, opposition	objection, great interest, rage

 

Within the speech of a single person contrasts in pitch are significant. Let’s consider several examples.

• “I don’t know”:1) low fall – grim, 2) high fall – categoric
• “Not once”: 1) low fall – “Never”, 2) fall-rise – “Many times”
• “You’ll fall”: 1) fall-rise – warning (Ведь упадешь!), 2) fall – statement (Ты точно упадешь!)
• “No”: 1) answer to “Do you beat your wife?” with rise-fall – objection, 2) reaction to “I don’t like oranges” with fall-rise – implication is expressed (А что с тобой?)

Pitch may perform exactly the same demarcative function (ф-ция разграничения) as a pause. The difference between “I don’t know” and “I don’t, no” lies in the pitch that operates on whole utterances. Or: “My brother – who’s abroad – has sent me a letter” (I have only one brother) and “My brother who’s abroad - has sent me a letter” (I have many brothers).

So pitch phenomena are very complex. There can be numerous combinations of falls and rises and, consequently, the attitudes and emotions they express.

 

According to the British school of phonetics, intonation is a contour. A contour represents a tone-group consisting structurally of 4 basic parts. It’s a horizontal approach to intonation.

A contour contains the pre-head, the head, the nucleus and the tail.

Nucleus is the last stressed syllable of the contour. It is the syllable within which the tone changes (rises or falls):Don't you know it?

Head is the first fully stressed syllable: Whata difference from this time last week!

The stretch lying between the head and the nucleus is called body.

The syllables before the first stressed syllable are called pre-head: But do you 'really understand it?

Tail consists of the unstressed or weakly stressed syllables after the nucleus up to a pause: But can I ↓believe you when you say that?

The meaning of a contour may change with a new choice of nucleus tone and a new placement of the pre-head, head and tail within the voice range. The number of possible combinations is more than 100. But not all of them are equally important. That’s why, the number may be reduced to fewer combinations that are important. Thus Prof. O’Connor gives only 10 important tone-groups.

 

According to the Russian school of phonetics, intonation is many things. It’s a complex unity of several phonetic items. Here is a general scheme:

INTONATION

RHYTHM + SPEECH + TEMPO + TIMBER [tæmbә]

MELODY

STRESS

LOUDNESS TONE DURATION

PROLONGATION

AMPLITUDE OF VIBRATIONS PITCH PAUSATION

RESPIRATION RATE OF VIBRATIONS

 

So by intonation Russian phoneticians usually understand speech melody, pitch, stress, tone, loudness, rhythm etc. On the surface the approach looks heterogeneous, but beneath the surface there are more distinct interconnections.

Rhythm is defined as a regular co-occurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The definition shows that rhythm is closely connected with stress. Stress is connected with loudness (the stressed syllable is pronounced louder than others). Loudness depends upon the amplitude of vibrations (the greater the amplitude – the louder the sound). And the amplitude of vibrations in its turn depends upon the force of exhalation - that is respiration.

Speech melody is a contour consisting of different tones. A tone is either no change in pitch (level tone) or a change in pitch (fall, rise…). Pitch is based upon the rate of vibrations (see above).

Tempo is the rate of an utterance (it can normal, fast be slow). Tempo of an utterance influences the duration of the syllables. The more durable the utterance is, the more prolonged are the sounds and the syllables (prolongation). There can never be constant prolongation of sounds or syllables, that’s why there occur some pauses (pausation). The number of pauses influences the tempo of the utterance.

Timber is the quality of a musical sound, a special colouring of the speaker’s voice. It’s used to express various emotions and moods.

 

Conclusion. In the treatment of intonation as one thing (pitch or contour) phoneticians just single out the most important phonetic item and view it as the cause of possible semantic modifications. As to Russian phoneticians, they consider intonation to be a more complicated thing. So the attitudes, emotions and logic conveyed by an utterance are dependent on a number of intonation components.