Intonation and Its Parts: Melody in Spoken English"It's not what she said, it's the way that she said it," is a complaint we have all heard (or made) some time or another. What does it refer to? It obviously relates to the various forms of wordless communication, but especially to the speaker's use of intonation the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice to convey sarcasm or resignation, anger or apprehension, or any of scores of other moods. In this summation of over forty years of investigation and reflection, the author analyzes the nature, variety and utility of intonation, using some 700 examples from everyday English speech. The work looks at both accent (pitch shift that points up individual words) and overall configurations (melodies that shape the meaning of whole sentences). It shows that most easily understood utterances employ one or another of a surprisingly small stock of basic melodies, and it shows both intonation and visible gesture to be parts of a larger complex that conveys grammatical as well as emotional information. Though it is one of the major divisions of the science of linguistics, intonation is of great interest to others outside of linguistics to actors and lawyers who must use the voice to assert, to downplay, or to emote; to English teachers as an essential ingredient of idiomatic speech; to musicians for its many common elements in music theory; and to psychologists and anthropologists as a gauge of emotional tension and a clue to behavior. |
Contents
Pitch | 3 |
Tuning the Ear 4 Accent and Intonation 9 Tone Languages | 12 |
Stress Versus Accent 14 Accent as Figure and Ground 15 Vowel Quality | 18 |
Intonation | 24 |
High and Low Pitch 24 Intonation and Grammar 25 Intonation | 32 |
Full and Reduced Vowels 37 Syllable Sequences and Timing | 39 |
Two Kinds of Rhythm | 46 |
Forces Opposing Isochrony | 70 |
Profile B 152 Profile CA 155 Profile CB 160 Profiles AC and CAC | 161 |
Covers | 191 |
Cultural Adaptations 197 The Coupling of Intonation and Gesture | 199 |
Syntactic Effects 205 Gradi | 213 |
The Fundamental Pitch and Its Variations 215 Register 216 Binarity | 234 |
The Contradiction Contour 245 Summary of Terms Used to | 252 |
Sandhi 261 Overlap | 267 |
Contours in Particular | 274 |
Accents of Power | 74 |
Informing Versus Impressing 74 Climax 75 Permanent Effects of Cli | 86 |
Interest Information Contrast 89 Wh Words and Focus 95 Deaccent | 98 |
Profiles | 139 |
Profiles as Accent Configurations 139 Profile A 142 Profile C | 149 |
Contours Ending in A 277 Contours Ending in B 306 Contours Ending | 332 |
A Vowel Reduction Derivation and Stress 347 B The Supposed Equiva | 361 |
References 399 Additional Works by the Author | 407 |
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Common terms and phrases
accent of power accented syllable ambiguity American English answer B+AC Bolinger Boraxo CB+C Chapter clause compound context contour contrast creak cues deaccented difference diphthong downmotion downtilt drop dropback effect emotion emphatic English expression extra length fact fall falsetto full syllable full vowel function word gesture glide grammatical happens hearer high pitch higher ideophonic imply intonation John jump Kenyon and Knott lable Ladd language last example less low pitch main accent mark meaning monotone normal noun pattern phonetic phrase pitch accent position possible primary prominence pronunciation prosody question reduced vowels relative height rheme rhythm rising tail sandhi secondary sentence separate shape shwa Similarly someone speaker speech stereotyped téll tence terminal rise thing tion tional tone languages trochee unaccented syllables utterance verb versus vowel reduction word
References to this book
A Metrical Theory of Stress and Destressing in English and Dutch René Kager No preview available - 1989 |