Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

Intonation
Intonation is the term commonly given to variation in the pitch of a speaker’s voice. In
lay usage, it is often taken to include all such variation, and overall impressions of its
effects are described variously in terms of characteristic ‘tunes’ or ‘lilts’, often with
special reference to the speech of a particular individual or to that of a geographically
defined group of speakers. As a technical term in linguistics, however, it usually has a
more restricted application to those pitch phenomena which contribute to the meaningdefining
resources of the language in question.
A distinction can be made between two types of language. In the tone languages, a
group which includes, for instance, many of the languages in use in the Far East, the
choice of one pitch treatment rather than another serves to differentiate particular lexical
items (as well as sometimes serving a suprasegmental function, as described below). In
the other group, which includes the modern European languages, it is said to have a
suprasegmental function. This is to say that the lexical content of any utterance is held
to be already determined by other means (i.e. by its segmental composition), so that
intonation has to be thought of as adding meaning of some other kind to stretches of
speech which are usually of greater extent than the single lexical item. Discovering what
the stretches of speech are that are so affected, and developing a conceptual framework
within which the peculiar contribution that intonation makes to meaning can be made
explicit, are essential parts of the business of setting up systematic descriptions of the
phenomenon.
It is fair to say that attempts to provide such descriptions of the intonation resources of
particular languages have been rather less successful than have those which relate to
other aspects of linguistic organization like syntax and segmental phonology. Certainly
the descriptive models that have been proposed have commanded less widespread assent.
One general reason for this is doubtless the comparative recency of serious analytical
interest in speech compared with the many centuries of scholarly preoccupation with the
written text. There are, however, two specific, and closely related problems that could be
said to have got in the way of progress.
The first derives from what is, in reality, apretheoretical definition of the phenomenon.
The practice of starting with the nature of the speech signal as something susceptible to
detailed physical analysis, and of proceeding on this basis to separate out pitch from other
variables like loudness and length for individual attention has tended to obscure the fact
that simultaneous variation on all these parameters probably plays a part in our
perception of all the functional oppositions whereby differences in intonational meaning
are created. Moreover, a strong tradition which has encouraged making an initial
separation between what have been referred to as levels of pitch and levels of stress has
made it difficult to appreciate the essential features of the unified system in which they
both work.
The difficulty of knowing just what physical features of the data to take note of, and of
appreciating how those features combine as realizations of perceived linguistic contrasts,