Intonation - prosody

Schools of prosody

There have been many theoretical approaches to prosody. The earliest such schools dealt with the metrical structure of poetic verse
(eg. the ancient Greeks).

Often the British and American approaches to prosody are contrasted, but this dichotomy is a simplification of the diversity of theoretical and experimental perspectives.

British schools

Crombie (1987) listed the following three British approaches to intonation:-

• syntactic approach
• affective or attitudinal approach
• discoursal approach

Crombie (1987) states that the British schools have the following elements in common:-

• "dividing the flow of speech into tone groups or tone units ( tonality)"
• "locating the syllables on which major movements of pitch occur ( tonicity)"
• "identifying the direction of pitch movements ( tone)"

British schools tend to focus on pitch contours or tunes whilst American schools tend to focus on pitch levels. Different tunes are associated with different meanings.

Central to British models of prosody is the idea of the "tone group".

A tone group is a sequence of speech dominated by prominent or accented word. The accented word is the focal point for the tonal characteristics of the tone group. It contains the strongest, most prominent syllable (usually its primary stressed syllable). The accented syllable, or rather the strongest syllable in the accented word, is often referred to as the nuclear syllable or the tonic syllable. A tone group can contain one or more rhythmic feet. Each foot is dominated by a stressed syllable. In English a foot starts with a stressed syllable and ends with the last unstressed syllable before the next stress.

As an example of a British school we will examine the approach of Michael Halliday and Systemic-Functional linguistics.

Halliday

"It is not enough to treat intonation systems as if they merely carried a set of emotional nuances ... English intonation contrasts are grammatical" (Halliday, 1967:10)

In contrast, Pike (1945:21), a founder of the American school said that intonation "... is merely a shade of meaning ... superimposed upon ... intrinsic lexical meaning according to the attitude of the speaker".

A consequence of Halliday's view of intonation was that being a part of grammar it should be analysed in the same way as other grammatical systems. Halliday utilises the British concept of tunes which extend across a section of text. These tunes have a "nucleus" which is the "first (salient) syllable in the tonic foot".

Tonality, according to Halliday, is related to the number of tone groups in an utterance and each such tone group is seen as one "move" in a speech act. Tone is "... a complex pattern built out of a simple opposition between certain and uncertain polarity." (Halliday, 1967:30)

Halliday describes 5 simple and 2 compound primary tones for English. They are:-

• Tone 1 - falling
• Tone 2 - high rising
• Tone 3 - low rising
• Tone 4 - falling-rising
• Tone 5 - rising-falling
• Tone 13 - falling plus low rising
• Tone 53 - rising-falling plus low rising

"If polarity is certain, the pitch of the tonic falls; if uncertain, it rises." (Halliday, 1967:30) Polarity refers to the truth of a statement ("true" or "false" in fact or in belief) or to whether something is "known" versus "unknown". From these tones and the idea of polarity, Halliday builds up a complex pattern of relationships between tone and meaning.

• Tone 1: falling tone - "polarity known ... the unmarked realisation of a statement" (also a question with known polarity)
• Tone 2: rising tone - "polarity unknown ... the unmarked realisation of a yes-no question"
• Tone 3: low rising - "not yet decided whether know or unknown... dependent on something else"
• Tone 4: falling-rising - "seems certain, but turns out not to be. It is associated with reservations and conditions"
• Tone 5: rising-falling - "seems uncertain, but turns out to be certain. It is used on strong, especially contradicting assertions ... It often carries an implication of 'you ought to know that"

(the above is from Halliday, 1985, 281-282)

Some examples:-

• Tone 1 (falling) "That's a dog." - statement
• Tone 1 (falling) "Is Fido a dog?" - question with known polarity
• Tone 2 (rising) "Are you coming?" - I don't know if you are coming but want to know. cf. Tone 1 (falling) "Are you coming?" - this is a bit more like a command.
• Tone 3 (low-rising) "I think I'll come tomorrow." - but not really sure.
• Tone 4 (falling-rising) "Bill is coming if he's allowed." - conditional statement.
• Tone 5 (rising-falling) "You ought to know that."

Tone in intonation and lexical tone

The use of the word "tone" in some theories of intonation and prosody needs to be clarified.

This usage must not be confused with lexical tone in tone languages, where changing the pitch contour of a word changes its meaning . For example, changing the tone on "ma" in Mandarin Chinese may change the meaning from "horse" to "mother". That is, changing the tone means that you have selected a different word.

Lexical tone in tone languages is usually attached to a single syllable.

Prosodic tone is attached to a higher level entity such as a tone group (a phrase or sentence characterised by a particular prosodic pattern). Occasionally a tone group might only consist of a single word, which might in turn be a single syllable, but very often it consists of more than one word.

American schools

American schools of prosody are often described as relying on a phonemic or levels approach to intonation. For example, Bloomfield (1933) referred to "differences of pitch ... as secondary phonemes". (but note that Bloomfield, like the British, used pitch contours rather than pitch levels).

Pike (1945) used:-

• pitch heights to characterise intonation contours (contours are sequences of pitch height)
• a systematic approach to speaker attitude
• the interdependence of intonation, stress, quantity, tempo, rhythm and voice quality

(the above summary is after Chun(2002))

Pike (1945) utilised four levels of pitch because "four levels are enough to provide for the writing and distinguishing of all the contours which have differences of meaning so far discovered." "These four levels may, for convenience, be labeled extra-high, high, mid and low respectively..." (Pike, 1945)

The ToBI framework for transcribing prosody (eg. Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), Beckman et al. (2005)) is an intonation transcription system based on two relative levels (low and high). ToBI is particularly suited to phonetic analyses of prosody but increasingly it is used in studies of prosody and meaning.

The remainder of this topic will concentrate on the ToBI framework of Pierrehumbert, Beckman and others.

ToBI is dealt with the ToBI introduction page.

References

These texts were referred to above, but are not required reading.

1. Beckman, M. E., Hirschberg, J., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2005). "The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework". In S.-A. Jun, ed., Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, pp. 9-54. Oxford University Press.
2. Chun, D.M. (2002) Discourse Intonation in L2: From theory and research to practice, University of California, Santa Barbara
3. Crombie, W. (1987) "Intonation in English: A systematic perspective".
4. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967) Intonation and grammar in British English, The Hague: Mouton.
5. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) An introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Edward Arnold.
6. Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Beckman, M. E. (1988). Japanese Tone Structure (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series No. 15). MIT Press.
7. Pike, K.L. (1945) The intonation of American English, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.