ABSTRACT
The term intonation is difficult to delimit precisely but its narrowest sense of the melodic aspect of the language, excluding the question of which syllables may be stressed and which unstressed in words or higher linguistic units, is the one intended in this paper. Admittedly most writers on English intonation have treated ‘sentence stress’ as part of intonation. EFL difficulties with tonic placement are very numerous, probably responsible for making more utterances unidiomatic than any other feature. However, many teachers seem to believe that intonation proper (i.e. excluding tonicity) is an area of great difficulty for them, some apparently imagining as great as or even greater than tonicity. To dispel this false impression is a main aim of the present paper. 1
