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Typical intonation of English tag question
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| Typical intonation of English tag question
The term intonation refers to a means for conveying information in speech which is independent of the words and their sounds. Central to intonation is the modulation of pitch, and intonation is often thought of as the use of pitch over the domain of the utterance. However, the patterning of pitch in speech is so closely bound to patterns of timing and loudness, and sometimes voice quality, that we cannot consider pitch in isolation from these other dimensions. The interaction of intonation and stress — the patterns of relative prominence which characterise an utterance — is particularly close in many languages, including English. For those who prefer to reserve „intonation‟ for pitch effects in speech, the word „prosody‟ is convenient as a more general term to include patterns of pitch, timing, loudness, and (sometimes) voice quality. In this 11 Chapter, however, intonation will be used to refer to the collaboration of all these dimensions, and, where necessary, the term „melody‟ will be used to refer specifically to the pitch-based component. Intonation is used to carry a variety of different kinds of information. It signals grammatical structure, though not in a one-to-one way; whilst the end of a complete intonation pattern will normally coincide with the end of a grammatical structure such as a sentence or clause, even quite major grammatical boundaries may lack intonational marking, particularly if the speech is fast. Intonation can reflect the information structure of an utterance, highlighting constituents of importance. Intonation can indicate discourse function; for instance most people are aware that saying „This is the eeds train‟ with one intonation constitutes a statement, but, with another, a question. Intonation can be used by a speaker to convey an attitude such as friendliness, enthusiasm, or hostility; and listeners can use intonation-related phenomena in the voice to make inferences about a speaker‟s state, including excitement, depression, and tiredness. Intonation can also, for instance, help to regulate turn-taking in conversation, since there are intonational mechanisms speakers can use to indicate that they have had their say, or, conversely, that they are in full flow and don‟t want to be interrupted. Intonation is not the only linguistic device for which pitch is recruited by languages; many languages use pitch to distinguish words. In languages around the world as diverse as Thai, Hausa (Nigeria), and Mixtec (Mexico), words are distinguished not only by vowels and consonants but also by the use of one of a limited set of distinctive pitch patterns or heights on each syllable. Such languages are called tone languages. A number of other languages, such as Swedish and Japanese, make a more limited use of pitch to distinguish words. These languages might best be called lexical accent languages. All tone languages and lexical accent languages also have intonation, but in general the greater a language‟s use of pitch for distinguishing words, the less scope it has to develop an elaborate intonation system. English, on the other hand, is not a 12 tone language or lexical accent language, and is generally agreed to have relatively complex intonation. (Nolan, 2014, pp. 1,2) English tag questions can have a rising or a falling intonation pattern. [3] This can be contrasted with Polish, French or German, for example, where all tags rise, or with the Celtic languages, where all fall. As a rule, the English rising pattern is used when soliciting information or motivating an action, that is, when some sort of response is required. Since normal English yes/no questions have rising patterns (e.g. Are you coming?), these tags make a grammatical statement into a real question: Ex: You're coming, aren't you? The falling pattern is used to underline a statement. The statement itself ends with a falling pattern, and the tag sounds like an echo, strengthening the pattern. Most English tag questions have this falling pattern. Ex: He doesn't know what he's doing, does he? The meaning of a tag question can be changed with the pitch of our voice. With rising intonation, it sounds like a real question. But if our intonation falls, it sounds more like a statement that doesn't require a real answer. tải về 0.54 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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