Form and function in intonation

To summarize what was said above, we want to know the answers to two questions about English speech:

i) What can we observe when we study pitch variations?

ii) What is the linguistic importance of the phenomena we observe?

These questions might be rephrased more briefly as:

i) What is the form of intonation?

ii) What is the function of intonation?

We will begin by looking at intonation in the shortest piece of speech we can find - the single syllable. At this point a new term will be introduced: we need a name for a continuous piece of speech beginning and ending with a clear pause, and we will call this an utterance. We are going to look at the intonation of one-syllable utterances. These are quite common, and give us a comparatively easy introduction to the subject.

Two common one-syllable utterances are 'yes' and 'no'. The first thing to notice is that we have a choice of saying these with the pitch remaining at a constant level, or with the pitch changing from one level to another. The word we use for the overall behavior of the pitch in these examples is tone; a one-syllable word can be said with either a level tone or a moving tone. If you try saying 'yes' or 'no' with a level tone (rather as though you were trying to sing them on a steady note) you may find the result does not sound natural, and indeed English speakers do not use level tones on one-syllable utterances very frequently. Moving tones are more common. If English speakers want to say 'yes' or 'no' in a definite, final manner they will probably use a falling tone - one which descends from a higher to a lower pitch. If they want to say 'yes?' or 'no?' in a questioning manner they may say it with a rising tone - a movement from a lower pitch to a higher one.

Notice that already, in talking about different tones, some idea of function has been introduced; speakers are said to select from a choice of tones according to how they want the utterance to be heard, and it is implied that the listener will hear one-syllable utterances said with different tones as sounding different in some way. During the development of modern phonetics in the twentieth century it was for a long time hoped that scientific study of intonation would make it possible to state what the function of each different aspect of intonation was, and that foreign learners could then be taught rules to enable them to use intonation in the way that native speakers use it. Few people now believe this to be possible. It is certainly possible to produce a few general rules, and some will be given in this course, just as a few general rules for word stress. However, these rules are certainly not adequate as a complete practical guide to how to use English intonation. My treatment of intonation is based on the belief that foreign learners of English at advanced levels who may use this course should be given training to make them better able to recognize and copy English intonation. The only really efficient way to learn to use the intonation of a language is the way a child acquires the intonation of its first language, and the training referred to above should help the adult learner of English to acquire English intonation in a similar (though much slower) way - through listening to and talking to English speakers. It is perhaps a discouraging thing to say, but learners of English who are not able to talk regularly with native speakers of English, or who are not able at least to listen regularly to colloquial English, are not likely to learn English intonation, although they may learn very good pronunciation of the segments and use stress correctly.