Expressing attitudes

What advice, then, can be given to the foreign learner of English who wants to learn "correct intonation"? It is certainly true that a few generalizations can be made about the attitudinal functions of some components of intonation.

Generalizations such as these are, however, very broad, and foreign learners do not find it easy to learn to use intonation through studying them. Similarly, within the area of prosodic components most generalizations tend to be rather obvious: wider pitch range tends to be used in excited or enthusiastic speaking, slower speed is typical of the speech of someone who is tired or bored, and so on. Most of the generalizations one could make are probably true for a lot of other languages as well. In short, of the rules and generalizations that could be made about conveying attitudes through intonation, those which are not actually wrong are likely to be too trivial to be worth learning. I have witnessed many occasions when foreigners have unintentionally caused misunderstanding or even offence in speaking to a native English speaker, but can remember only a few occasions when this could be attributed to "using the wrong intonation"; most such cases have involved native speakers of different varieties of English, rather than learners of English. Sometimes an intonation mistake can cause a difference in apparent grammatical meaning. It should not be concluded that intonation is not important for conveying attitudes. What is being claimed here is that, although it is of great importance, the complexity of the total set of sequential and prosodic components of intonation and of paralinguistic features makes it a very difficult thing to teach or learn. One might compare the difficulty with that of trying to write rules for how one might indicate to someone that one finds him or her really attractive; while psychologists and biologists might make detailed observations and generalizations about how human beings of a particular culture behave in such a situation, most people would rightly feel that studying these generalizations would be no substitute for practical experience, and that relying on a textbook could lead to hilarious consequences. The attitudinal use of intonation is something that is best acquired through talking with and listening to English speakers, and this course aims simply to train learners to be more aware of and sensitive to the way English speakers use intonation.