Intonation of function and application

intonation (Latin: intono "I pronounce loudly") is a set of prosodic characteristics of a sentence: tone (melody of speech), volume, tempo of speech and its individual segments, rhythm, and phonation features.

Intonation together with stress and tone forms the prosodic system of language. Unlike segmental phonetic units (phonemes) and differential features that do not have their own content plan, all intonation units are two-sided, in other words, they are signs, expressing one or another meaning.

There are two types of intonation means ( intonemes ):

• phrasal accents - are placed mainly on stressed syllables of words; their main feature is a tone break. They perform the most important functions of intonation: the direction of tone movement indicates the purpose of the utterance, or illocution (for example, in Russian, an ascending tone movement serves as an indicator of a general question), the place of the phrasal accent is on the "focus" of the utterance (the element of the sentence that interests the speaker most: cf. Vanya arrived on Tuesday ? and Vanya arrived on Tuesday? );
• integral (non-accentual) characteristics - cover groups of words or entire sentences.

The same intonation means can be used both as part of phrasal accents and as integral characteristics of an intonation group (phrase, sentence). In a sentence, intonation features of both types form various combinations. In writing, intonation is partly expressed by punctuation marks, dividing the text into paragraphs, and varying fonts; however, the range of meanings available to intonation is much wider than that of punctuation.

• Expressive: expression of the speaker's emotions, impact on the listener's emotions. It is implemented by integral means, which is the reason for the latter's characteristic for dialogic and artistic speech.
• Syntactic: the syntactic component of a sentence is often designed as a single intonation group with common integral characteristics and one phrasal accent.
• Euphonic: contributing to the euphony of a section of speech, in particular its division into fragments of comparable duration, alternation of strong and weak stresses.

All vocal languages ​​use pitch pragmatically in intonation—for example, for emphasis, to express surprise or irony, or to ask questions. Tonal languages ​​such as Chinese and Hausa use intonation in addition to using pitch to differentiate words. Many authors have attempted to list the different functions of intonation. Perhaps the longest list was that of W. R. Lee [ , who proposed ten. J. C. Wells and E. Cooper-Coolen both proposed six functions. Wells's list is given below; the examples are not his:

• behavioral function (to express emotions and relationships)

example: falling from a high note on the syllable "mor" in the word "good morning" suggests more excitement than falling from a low note

• grammatical function (to determine grammatical structure)

example: it is argued that in English, falling pitch is associated with statements, but 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 British English.

• focusing (show what information in a statement is new and what is already known)

example: in English, the phrase I saw a ↘ man in the garden answers "Who did you see?" or "What happened?", while the phrase I saw a man in the garden answers "Did you hear a man in the garden?"

• discourse function (show how sentences and parts of sentences are combined in spoken language)

example: subordinate clauses often have a lower pitch, faster tempo, and narrower pitch range than their main clause, as is the case with the parenthetical material in "The Red Planet is (known to be) the fourth from the sun."

• psychological function (to organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, remember and reproduce)

example: the statement "You can get this in red, blue, green, yellow, or ↘black" is more difficult to understand and remember than the same statement divided into tonal units, such as "You can get this in ↗red | ↗blue | ↗green | ↗yellow | or ↘black"

• index function (to act as a marker of personal or social identity)

example: membership in a group can be indicated by the use of intonation patterns adopted specifically by that group, such as by street vendors or preachers. This is discussed at https://intellect.icu . The so-called high rising terminal, where a statement ends in a high rising tone, is thought to be typical of young English speakers and perhaps more common among young female speakers.

It is unknown whether such a list would be applicable to other languages ​​without modification.

In linguistics:

In language, intonation of a function indicates the “color” or emotional direction. For example:

• Semantic accents: Speech functions can change depending on the speaker's intonation. The same phrase can be interrogative, affirmative or exclamatory, which sets a different emotional context.
• Functions in dialogue: Questions, requests, statements and objections - all these functions can be expressed with different intonations that convey the speaker's intention and his emotional state.

In organizational management:

Here the intonation of function concerns the nature of the role that a person or department plays:

• Support and control functions: For example, the control department may act formally and strictly, which sets discipline. In contrast, the HR department may operate with a more friendly, supportive tone, focused on communication and support for staff.
• Role and Responsibilities: A manager can perform their role with the tone of a mentor, emphasizing training and support, or a controller, focusing on compliance with rules and deadlines.

Music :

In sound design and music, intonation can mean changing the pitch, timbre, or volume of a sound based on parameters.

Until the mid-20th century, Russian linguistics mainly studied the role of intonation in distinguishing types of utterance. In the 1940s and 1950s, interest in the relationship between intonation and syntax increased.

In the 1960s, E. A. Bryzgunova proposed a description of intonation in the Russian language using the concept of intonation construction. The basis for classifying constructions is the nature of the tone on the stressed syllable and adjacent syllables, collectively called the center of the construction.

To determine the inventory of intonation means of a specific language, as in determining the phoneme system, the method of comparing minimal pairs can be used, as well as identifying position-dependent (for example, position relative to stress) variants.

Cruttenden points out the extreme difficulty of making meaningful comparisons between the intonation systems of different languages, a difficulty compounded by the lack of a coherent descriptive structure. [

Falling intonation is said to be used at the end of questions in some languages, including Hawaiian, Fijian, Samoan and Greenlandic. It is also used in Hawaiian Creole English, thought to have evolved from Hawaiian. The rise is common in utterances in urban Belfast; the fall in most questions is said to be typical of urban Leeds speech.

An ESRC-funded project (E. Grabe, B. Post and F. Nolan) to study the intonation of nine urban accents of British English in five different styles of speech has resulted in the IViE corpus and a specially designed transcription system. The corpus and notation system can be downloaded from the project website. This work is followed by an article explaining that the dialects of British and Irish English differ significantly.

A project to combine intonation descriptions from twenty different languages, ideally using a single descriptive framework (INTSINT), resulted in a book published in 1998 by D. Hurst and A. Di Cristo. The languages ​​covered were American English, British English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish, Hungarian, Western Arabic (Moroccan), Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Beijing Chinese. A number of authors did not use the INTSINT system, but chose to use their own system.

People with congenital amusia have an impaired ability to distinguish, identify and imitate the intonation of the last words in sentences.

Use of intonation

Exercise

Try to classify the following lists of non-linguistic signals into five categories - Posture, Facial Expressions, Gestures, Distancing and Intonation.

• 1. He exclaimed: “I wish I could just once make sure that you will carry out the task entrusted to you!”
• 2. She took a step back: “What do you imagine?”
• 3. He stood leaning against the sideboard, his legs crossed.
• 4. Four-year-old Velinda assured her mother that she could button her coat herself. Her mother said, "Of course you can do it, my treasure!" and immediately buttoned the little girl's coat herself.
• 5. While Nixon claimed that he was seeking contact with the younger generation, he repeatedly put his hands forward, as if defending himself, as if he wanted to move away from the audience.
• 6.You wait, shifting from foot to foot, while the assistant fills out the form.
• 7. He goes to the window and closes it.
• 8. She looked at him silently, but the wings of her nose trembled with barely restrained excitement.
• 9.The coffee was so hot that he instinctively spat it out.
• 10. He said ironically: “The gearbox is just happy that you press the pedal so hard.”