ABSTRACT
LOOKING AHEAD Intonation is part of the language system. When anyone speaks, there are features of the voice that we call paralanguage and which are not truly part of language. Like gestures and other visual phenomena, paralanguage leads us to form some opinion of the speaker and hence of his/her message, but these elements are not systematic. (See Section 11.1.)
The elements of intonation are changes in the frequency of vibration of the vocal cords, centering on the accented syllable. We recognize falling and rising tunes of different lengths and combinations of such rises and falls. In general, falling tunes suggest finality; they are used when the speaker asserts something or, in a question, is confident of an answer. Rising tunes are more oriented toward the addressee and suggest openness (Section 11.2). The onset of a tone unit may be high or low; a high onset creates an extra center of attention. (See Section 11.3.)
When an utterance consists of two or more tone units, we can distinguish a nuclear tone unit, preceded by an onset tone unit and/or followed by a coda tone unit. Either of these may have a rise or a fall, with different effects for the whole utterance. (See Section 11.4.)
11.1 Paralanguage The meanings which most of us think about, most of the time, are the meanings expressed in language. But there are more subtle meanings that are communicated in a speech situation. If two strangers who speak the same language have occasion to converse for a while and then go their separate ways, each will have some impression of the other: place of origin perhaps, social status, education, maybe something of the individual’s personality (friendly, nervous, self-assured, restrained, etc.) and mood at the moment (tired, elated, angry, distraught, etc.), and the individual’s attitude toward the context of this conversation and to the
other participant. Part of these impressions is communicated by the words the speaker uses, the way they are pronounced, and the ways that words are put together to make utterances. All this is the primary channel of communication, what is vocal and verbal, the voice using words. Other meanings are communicated by elements that are neither vocal nor verbal: the distance maintained between the people in the conversation (the study and description of which is sometimes called proxemics); their posture, clothing, facial expressions, hair styles, and everything that can be called appearance; gestures made with head, arms, hands, or whole body-all the things which together are sometimes called ‘body language.’
