What is Intonation?

What is Intonation?

It is generally believed that spoken sounds occur strung together, one after the other. More precisely, speech is a continuum; a continuous flux of initiatory, phonatory, and articulatory states and movements, constantly changing, often overlapping and interpenetrating and influencing each other.

According to Catford (1992), when people look at isolated sounds, they are artificially cutting up that flowing chain of events into a series of segments or segmental sounds. In reality, these segments are the speech-sounds that are isolated out of the continuum. Although the segmentation of speech is an artificial procedure, linguists are obliged to do it to arrest the flow, as it were, in order to pin down individual sounds for detailed study.

However, one must also give attention to those phonetic phenomena that are characteristic not so much of individual segments as of their relations to each other, or of stretches of the speech continuum that are greater than one segment in length. Since such phenomena take account of more than just segments, they are sometimes called suprasegmental or prosodic features. According to Kreidler (1989), it is well known that English utterances are seldom spoken in monotones. For one, native English speakers produce melodies of varying kinds, with the voice rising and falling. Such melodies are technically called intonation.

Opinions do differ when defining intonation. Ladd (1980), an eminent Canadian scholar of phonology, defines it as “The use of suprasegmental phonetic features (pitch) to convey postlexical or sentence-level pragmatic meanings in a linguistically structured way” (p. 6). On the other hand, in