![]() At the start: speeding up, re-setting of pitch.Phrases have some or all of the following characteristics (roughly): The symbols mark minor and major intonational phrase boundaries. Talk is chunked up into phrases, whose boundaries reflect major syntactic boundaries. This is one of the main interfaces between phonetics and syntax and semantics. Phrasing and intonation give speakers clues about the syntax that organizes words into structures. Here, then, we have two instances where ‘yes’ is produced, but the intonation, along with other things, affects the ‘meaning’ of the ‘yes’, making it stronger and more affirmative, or weaker and prefacing a disagreement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the strength of agreement is audible too: the ‘yes’ in line 3 of the ‘washing machine’ extract is quiet, low pitched, and slow – a direct contrast with the ‘yes’ in line 5 of the ‘nice feet’ extract. So the ‘yes’ here is not whole-hearted, especially in comparison with the ‘yes’ of the first example. Agreeing late weakens the sense of agreement notice that Helen comes in and explains her assessment of the new system as ‘better’, and the next thing Elizabeth does is to find a reason why the new system is not very good (lines 7–8). Elizabeth agrees with this, but her agreement comes late (almost half a second later). Helen says the new system is ‘better than tokens though’. In this fragment, Elizabeth and Helen are discussing the system used to pay for the launderette at college, which has changed from tokens to a smart card. The second case, ‘washing machine’, also has a ‘yes’, in line 3. She does her agreement loud (represented with capital letters here) and with quite high pitch (represented by ). She does her agreement in line 5 almost immediately after Marion has assessed Vicky’s feet. Marion says she thought she had ‘quite nice feet’, and Wendy agrees with her. In (3), Marion and Wendy are discussing a character from a soap opera. They differ in intonation, loudness, pitch range, and in their location relative to the previous turn at talk and they also differ in the meanings they convey. ![]() Here are two examples of the word ‘yes’, both located after an assessment. fall–rise contours here mark different types of agreement. This illustrates that in English intonation handles utterance-level meanings: the fall vs. In lines 3–4, J qualifies her agreement that the other person is ‘nice’. In fact, this is how the conversation actually went: A fall–rise intonation contour in this context usually says: there is an upcoming disagreement. If line 2 had a fall followed by a rise (‘she /is nice’), where the pitch is high on ‘is’, but then falls and is low at the start of ‘nice’, rising up again at the end of ‘nice’, then most English speakers would say that the next word is likely to be ‘but’. If the contour is different, then the meaning is different. Most English speakers would say that line 2 produced this way expresses straightforward agreement. With a falling intonation contour (‘she is nice’), the pitch would be high on ‘is’, and fall to low at the end of ‘nice’. Now let us imagine different intonation contours here. The main stresses in the utterances are marked with underlining. In English, when words are repeated, it is normal for the stress to shift to a different word from the first time round: the ‘nice’ in line 2 is ‘deaccented’. J responds by repeating K’s words: ‘she is nice’. In the first line, K assesses another person as ‘really nice’, and invites J to agree with her (‘isn’t she’). Our focus of interest is line 2, ‘she is nice’. Here are two speakers assessing a third person: (It is safe to ignore the smaller movements of f0 on the unstressed syllables: they are not auditorily prominent in the way that movements on stressed syllables are.) In ‘hello (3)’, the f0 contour is the same as in ‘hello (2)’, but it is distributed over more material. The difference between the falling and rising contours should be visible enough. The placement of contours in English depends on the context.įigure 4.4 shows f0 traces for three utterances: ‘hello’, ‘hello’ and ‘hello there’. ![]() Other stressbearing syllables may, but need not, carry an intonation contour. This means that pitch movement starts on the stressed item and carries on over any subsequent syllables. In English utterances, the main stressed item of an utterance carries an intonation contour. These contours can be described using labels that refer to their shapes such as ‘fall’ (), ‘rise’ (), ‘fall–rise’ (), ‘rise–fall’ (), ‘level’, sometimes accompanied by a reference to where in the speaker’s overall range the contour is: ‘a high fall’, ‘a fall to low’, ‘a low rise’. Intonation is the linguistic use of particular f0 contours in the production of speech. In English, changes in pitch are associated with sentence- or utterance-level meanings and not e.g. All languages use changes in pitch to handle some aspect of meaning. ![]()
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