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3.4 Intonation Intonation involves “the occurrence of rec

urring pitch patterns, each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or on groups of words of varying length” (Cruttenden, 1997: 7). For example, the fall-rise tone in English typic

ally involves the meaning of a contrast within a limited set of items stated explicitly or implicitly.

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(Isn’t her name Mary?) No / Jenny The old man didn’t come / whereas the

young man / did come and actually enjoyed himself

I didn’t do it

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A difference in pitch changes the meaning of a group of words and when this happens, it is called a difference in intonation. The rising tone has a much higher pitch than the falling tone (Ladefoged, 2005: 13).

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Wells, John. 2006. English Intonation. Cambridge University Press. (with disc)

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A good set of books for practicing pronunciation,

with detailed guide

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3.5 Tone

Chinese Putonghua [pa]Chinese

characterPinyin

Tone symbol

Tone number

Tone description

Gloss

八 bā 55 High level ‘eight’

拔 bá 35 High rising‘pull out’

靶 bă 214Low falling

rising‘target’

坝 bà 51 High falling ‘dam’

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Pitch tracks of the four tones

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More meanings are found if we consider the different characters with the same pronunciation and pitch form.

Differences in pitch that can cause changes in word meaning are called differences in tone.

In Putonghua four tones (high level, high rising, low falling rising and high falling) can be recognized for distinguishing meaning while in Cantonese there are six such tones.

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The phenomenon of pitch contours gives us three types of language:

Chinese is a tone language, in which the meaning of a word is affected by the pitch and tones serve to differentiate lexical entries.

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English is of a different kind, in that the “tones” in English do not affect the meaning of individual words, but they may affect the meaning of the phrase or sentence and provide the functional or emotional meaning of the utterance.

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Languages like English have been put under various labels, including

stress language, stress-timed language, foot-timed language (in contrast to

syllable-timed language), stress accent language, and stress-and-intonation language.

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Pitch accent language: Such languages make use of both tone an

d stress (accent) in differentiating lexical meaning. Examples of pitch accent languages are not ra

re, including Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Serbo-Croatian, Parahã (a language spoken in the Amazonian rain forest), and Scottish Gaelic spoken in the Outer Hebrides.