Intonation

Spoken English is nothing more than a song because when a native speaker speaks,

in spite of not being consciously aware, innately utilizes a means of producing melody called intonation.

Opinions differ when it comes to defining intonation. In simple terms, intonation, according to

Kreidler (1989), is various melodies produced by the native whose voice goes up and down. Ladd

(1980), defines it as “the use of suprasegmental phonetic features (pitch) to convey post-lexical or

sentence-level pragmatic meanings in a linguistically structured way” (p. 6). As for John (1960), “it

is the variations taking place in the pitch of the musical note produced by vibration of the vocal

cords”.

Characterizing properties of intonation

Intonation is mostly associated with the existence of pitch over the stretch of an utterance. Pitch is

produced by the variation of the vocal folds. The continuous variation in the sounds we perceive is

a result of the vibration of the vocal cords. The movements of the folds regulate the degrees of

pitch: when the vocal folds are in a thick configuration the pitch is lower than when they are in a

thin configuration (Roca & Johnson, 1999).

The functions of intonation

According to Roach (2000), intonation performs the several functions:

1. Attitudinal function: Speaking without intonation produces “mechanical speech”. Intonation

enables us to express emotions and attitudes as we speak.

2. Accentual function: Tonic stress (also called tonic accent) always accompanies intonation. In

other words, when a speaker speaks with intonation, he/she will put a strongest prominence on the

syllable which carries tonic stress and is considered to be the most important in the tone-unit.

3. Grammatical function: Intonation assists listeners in identifying the syntactic structure of a

sentence such as the placement of boundaries between phrases, clauses or sentences and so on.

4. Discourse function: Intonation give listeners a sign to what is new or what is contrasted or what

is emphasized and what kind of response they are supposed to do by speakers.

 

Reference

Jones, D. (1960) An outline of English phonetics. (9th ed.). Cambridge: Heffer.

Kreidler, C. W. (1989). The Pronunciation of English: A course book in phonology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Ladd, D. R. (1980). The Structure of intonational meaning., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Roach, P. (2000). English phonetics and phonology: A practical course. (3^rd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Roca, I. & Johnson, W. (1999). A course in phonology. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.