In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour (i.e.,is Maria able to speak either Spanish or French?), but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French" (i.e.,I know Maria can speak either Spanish or French, but I don't know which it iswhich is it?). Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).
Transcription
Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need to be explained in the context of what is being described. However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article. Global rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right and falling left-to-right , respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope:
He found it on the street?
Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it.
Yes, he found it on the street.
How did you ever escape?
Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question.
In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished:
Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time. Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time. Dipping or Fall-rise Intonation falls and then rises. Peaking or Rise-fall Intonation rises and then falls.
It is also common to trace the pitch of a phrase with a line above the phrase, adjacent to the phrase, or even through (overstriking) the phrase. Such usage is not supported by Unicode as of 2015, but the symbols have been submitted. The following example requires an SIL font such as Gentium Plus, either as the default browser font or as the user-defined font for IPA text, for which see Template:IPA#Usage.
[][ ]
Functions
All vocal languages use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for instance for emphasis, to convey surprise or irony, or to pose a question. Tonal languages such as Chinese and Hausa use intonation in addition to using pitch for distinguishing words. Many writers have attempted to produce a list of distinct functions of intonation. Perhaps the longest was that of W.R. Lee, who proposed ten. J.C. Wells and E. Couper-Kuhlen both put forward six functions. Wells's list is given below; the examples are not his: attitudinal function (for expressing emotions and attitudes) example: a fall from a high pitch on the 'mor' syllable of "good morning" suggests more excitement than a fall from a low pitch grammatical function (to identify grammatical structure) example: it is claimed that in English a falling pitch movement is associated with statements, but a rising pitch turns a statement into a yes–no question, as in He's going ↗home?. This use of intonation is more typical of American English than of British. focusing (to show what information in the utterance is new and what is already known) example: in English I saw a ↘man in the garden answers "Whom did you see?" or "What happened?", while I ↘saw a man in the garden answers "Did you hear a man in the garden?" discourse function (to show how clauses and sentences go together in spoken discourse) example: subordinate clauses often have lower pitch, faster tempo and narrower pitch range than their main clause, as in the case of the material in parentheses in "The Red Planet (as it's known) is fourth from the sun" psychological function (to organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, memorize and perform) example: the utterance "You can have it in red blue green yellow or ↘black" is more difficult to understand and remember than the same utterance divided into tone units as in "You can have it in ↗red | ↗blue | ↗green | ↗yellow | or ↘black" indexical function (to act as a marker of personal or social identity) example: group membership can be indicated by the use of intonation patterns adopted specifically by that group, such as street vendors or preachers. The so-called high rising terminal, where a statement ends with a high rising pitch movement, is said to be typical of younger speakers of English, and possibly to be more widely found among young female speakers. It is not known whether such a list would apply to other languages without alteration.
English
The description of English intonation has developed along different lines in the US and in Britain (and, indeed, different US and British dialects may follow different intonation patterns).
British approaches
British descriptions of English intonation can be traced back to the 16th century. Early in the 20th century the dominant approach in the description of English and French intonation was based on a small number of basic "tunes" associated with intonation units: in a typical description, Tune 1 is falling, with final fall, while Tune 2 has a final rise. Phoneticians such as H. E. Palmer broke up the intonation of such units into smaller components, the most important of which was the nucleus, which corresponds to the main accented syllable of the intonation unit, usually in the last lexical word of the intonation unit. Each nucleus carries one of a small number of nuclear tones, usually including fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall, and possibly others. The nucleus may be preceded by a head containing stressed syllables preceding the nucleus, and a tail consisting of syllables following the nucleus within the tone unit. Unstressed syllables preceding the head (if present) or nucleus (if there is no head) constitute a pre-head. This approach was further developed by Halliday and by O'Connor and Arnold, though with considerable variation in terminology. This "Standard British" treatment of intonation in its present-day form is explained in detail by Wells and in a simplified version by Roach. Halliday saw the functions of intonation as depending on choices in three main variables: Tonality (division of speech into intonation units), Tonicity (the placement of the tonic syllable or nucleus) and Tone (choice of nuclear tone); these terms (sometimes referred to as "the three T's") have been used more recently.
Research by Crystal emphasized the importance of making generalizations about intonation based on authentic, unscripted speech, and the roles played by prosodic features such as tempo, pitch range, loudness and rhythmicality in communicative functions traditionally attributed to intonation alone.
The transcription of intonation in such approaches is normally incorporated into the line of text. A typical example would be:
We ˌlooked at the ↗sky | and ˈsaw the ↘clouds
In this example, the | mark indicates a division between intonation units.
An influential development in British studies of intonation has been Discourse Intonation, an offshoot of Discourse Analysis first put forward by David Brazil. This approach lays great emphasis on the communicative and informational use of intonation, pointing out its use for distinguishing between presenting new information and referring to old, shared information, as well as signalling the relative status of participants in a conversation (e.g. teacher-pupil, or doctor-patient) and helping to regulate conversational turn-taking. The description of intonation in this approach owes much to Halliday. Intonation is analysed purely in terms of pitch movements and "key" and makes little reference to the other prosodic features usually thought to play a part in conversational interaction.
American approaches
The dominant framework used for American English from the 1940s to the 1990s was based on the idea of pitch phonemes, or tonemes. In the work of Trager and Smith there are four contrastive levels of pitch: low (1), middle (2), high (3), and very high (4). (The important work of Kenneth Pike on the same subject had the four pitch levels labelled in the opposite way, with (1) being high and (4) being low). In its final form, the Trager and Smith system was highly complex, each pitch phoneme having four pitch allophones (or allotones); there was also a Terminal Contour to end an intonation clause, as well as four stress phonemes. Some generalizations using this formalism are given below. The American linguist Dwight Bolinger carried on a long campaign to argue that pitch contours were more important in the study of intonation than individual pitch levels.
Normal conversation is usually at middle or high pitch; low pitch occurs at the end of utterances other than yes–no questions, while high pitch occurs at the end of yes–no questions. Very high pitch is for strong emotion or emphasis. Pitch can indicate attitude: for example, Great uttered in isolation can indicate weak emotion (with pitch starting medium and dropping to low), enthusiasm (with pitch starting very high and ending low), or sarcasm (with pitch starting and remaining low). Declarative sentences show a 2–3–1 pitch pattern. If the last syllable is prominent the final decline in pitch is a glide. For example, in This is fun, this is is at pitch 2, and fun starts at level 3 and glides down to level 1. But if the last prominent syllable is not the last syllable of the utterance, the pitch fall-off is a step. For example, in That can be frustrating, That can be has pitch 2, frus- has level 3, and both syllables of -trating have pitch 1. Wh-questions work the same way, as in Who (2) will (2) help (3↘1)? and Who (2) did (3) it (1)?. But if something is left unsaid, the final pitch level 1 is replaced by pitch 2. Thus in John's (2) sick (3↘2) ..., with the speaker indicating more to come, John's has pitch 2 while sick starts at pitch 3 and drops only to pitch 2. Yes–no questions with a 2↗3 intonation pattern usually have subject-verb inversion, as in Have (2) you (2) got (2) a (2) minute (3, 3)? (Here a 2↗4 contour would show more emotion, while a 1↗2 contour would show uncertainty.) Another example is Has (2) the (2) plane (3) left (3) already (3, 3, 3)?, which, depending on the word to be emphasized, could move the location of the rise, as in Has (2) the (2) plane (2) left (3) already (3, 3, 3)? or Has (2) the (2) plane (2) left (2) already (2, 3, 3)? And for example the latter question could also be framed without subject-verb inversion but with the same pitch contour: The (2) plane (2) has (2) left (2) already (2, 3, 3)? Tag questions with declarative intent at the end of a declarative statement follow a 3↘1 contour rather than a rising contour, since they are not actually intended as yes–no questions, as in We (2) should (2) visit (3, 1) him (1), shouldn't (3, 1) we (1)? But tag questions exhibiting uncertainty, which are interrogatory in nature, have the usual 2↗3 contour, as in We (2) should (2) visit (3, 1) him (1), shouldn't (3, 3) we (3)?