ITI DELTA session Phonology: Intonation Module One Moodle notes

Why you are doing this

You need to have good language analysis skills for a lot of different sections of the exam. This
includes grammar, lexis, discourse and phonology. There are five phonology sessions spread
through the course
1. Sounds
2. Stress and rhythm
3. Intonation
4. Connected speech
5. Combining this in exam tasks
For a lot of people this is an area they are less familiar with, but it is one you may enjoy and even
come to love.

In this session we are just going to think about intonation

There is no one exam task that will focus only on phonology, but this could come up in the
terminology tasks and also in Paper Two tasks two or three.
As always this is just an introduction – you really should go on to do some reading about this
yourself.

What is intonation ?

Different writers vary a bit more on this than on other aspects of phonology, but they all seem to
agree on this bit (this is from Kelly How to teach pronunciation ).

Intonation
• is the way the voice goes up or down in pitch when we’re speaking
• is fundamental in expressing our thoughts - & understanding those of others
• is generally perceived and understood at an unconscious level

Did you ever watch the Muppets ?

You know the Swedish cook ? He never actually says anything, but he sounds Swedish. That’s
intonation – it varies from language to language (though there are huge commonalties across
languages as well). That’s what that last bit means – you don’t think about intonation, but almost
everyone does it well enough in their L1 to fit in.

This is Kelly How to Teach Pronunciation saying that more clearly

While you will also hear the term prosody (the melody and rhythms of speech) and the matter of
prominence is going to come up again (remember in stress – syllables that were longer, louder or
higher), the term most central to intonation is pitch.

According to Underhill, intonation is pattern of pitch variation. The higher the frequency of vibration
of your vocal chords, the higher the pitch and in speech the pitch of your voice varies continuously
over phonemes, sets of phonemes and whole utterances .. but there are patterns.

Tone Units

First we have to look at tone units. This is Underhill again

If you haven’t found it yet there is a great site by Mark Hancock with lots of ideas for teaching
phonology here. And if you still aren’t sure about tone units, the activities he presents for working on
these with learners in this pdf are good. They might help you get more feel for it if you try them
yourself. Tone units could be called sense units. If you read the first sentence of this paragraph out,
where would you stop for breath ? You would probably break it into three, right ?

If you haven’t found it yet // there is a great site by Mark Hancock // with lots of ideas for teaching
phonology here

If you read it out loud to a friend, stopping at the slash lines in this second version – can they
understand you ? Try it.

If you haven’t // found it yet there is a // great site by Mark Hancock with lots // of ideas for teaching
phonology here

So a tone unit has a single complete pitch pattern – it might be as short as one syllable, but it might
also have a tail, an onset, a head and a pre-head.
This is from Liz’s power point if you were in the live version of this session at ITI.

It must have a tonic syllable (the strongest or most prominent syllable in the whole thing), it might
have an onset syllable (if it is longer and another syllable is stressed) and the pitch movement we
are really interested in comes after the tonic syllable.
This is the same thing said by Collins and Mees Practical Phonetics and Phonology Routledge.

Sometimes it helps to look in a couple of different books as one of the writers will say it in a way that
chimes with you.
Also you can see they use a slightly different (but also clear) notation.

Pitch Movements

Meanwhile back to Liz (I’m guessing here, but Liz often does the phonology slots and it is definitely
her power point).

This is what Underhill says about it.

There are more complicated sub divisions too – but I’ll leave those for people who are keen on this
and want to look it up. I don’t want to terrify the rest of you – but do bear in mind something else
Underhill says a few pages later. These descriptions are meant to help you understand this more,
you don’t need to ‘learn’ patterns and you don’t need to teach this to your learners. Once you
understand the general ideas behind all this a bit better you will be able to help learners more
confidently (without having to mark onsets or heads or falls etc - knowing what they are helps you).
Try listening for some of this yourself.
You could use the activities for self study in something like Underhill’s Sound Foundations (they are
very good) or you could use series released to use with students – New Headway Pronunciation or
the Pronunciation in Use series.

This next activity is from the upper intermediate book of the Headway Pronunciation series.

the audio link is here

The audio link for this bit is here … and the key and the explanation are at the end of the document
– I’m just trying to show you that if this is all quite new to you then using the student materials can
be really useful.

In fact if you can’t hear these things you can usually work them out. There are some general rules –
this is another of the power point slides with the two most general ideas.
Match that up with the sentences above (it is simpler than the Headway key, isn’t it ?).
What are the functions of intonation ?

Kenworthy considers two – foregrounding & backgrounding

Crystal suggests 6
1. emotional
2. grammatical
3. informational (discourse)
4. textual (contrast & cohesion in text)
5. psychological (to aid memory in chunking)
6. indexical (marking social or personal identity)

But Roach has just four.

1. grammatical
2. attitudinal
3. accentual
4. discoursal

Roach also has a keen interest in Wikipedia. This is his blog about pages he has written for it and
other pages he thinks should be added to or changed – Wikipedia has long been a helpful place to
start looking up things on any subject, but it seem to become more and more robust as a reference
in itself (though in the other Modules you still need to go to actual sources, not just the distilled
versions you get there).
This is the list of the functions of intonation on Wikipedia and as you can probably see it seems to
contain all of the above one way or another.
They tell you the list is from Wells, J.C. (2006) English Intonation: An Introduction, CUP
Though it looks as though that goes well beyond what you need to read.

Attitudinal function (for expressing emotions and attitudes)

example: a fall from a high pitch on the 'mor' syllable of "good morning" suggests more excitement
than a fall from a low pitch

Grammatical function (to identify grammatical structure)

example: it is claimed that in English a falling pitch movement is associated with statements, but a
rising pitch turns a statement into a yes–no question, as in He's going ↗home?. This use of
intonation is more typical of American English than of British.

Focusing (to show what information in the utterance is new and what is already known)
example: in English I saw a ↘man in the garden answers "Whom did you see?" or "What
happened?", while I ↘saw a man in the garden answers "Did you hear a man in the garden?"

Discourse function (to show how clauses and sentences go together in spoken discourse)
example: subordinate clauses often have lower pitch, faster tempo and narrower pitch range than
their main clause, as in the case of the material in parentheses in "The Red Planet (as it's known) is
fourth from the sun"

Psychological function (to organize speech into units that are easy to perceive, memorize and
perform)
example: the utterance "You can have it in red blue green yellow or ↘black" is more difficult to
understand and remember than the same utterance divided into tone units as in "You can have it in
↗red | ↗blue | ↗green | ↗yellow | or ↘black"
Indexical function (to act as a marker of personal or social identity)
example: group membership can be indicated by the use of intonation patterns adopted specifically
by that group, such as street vendors or preachers. The so-called high rising terminal, where a
statement ends with a high rising pitch movement, is said to be typical of younger speakers of
English, and possibly to be more widely found among young female speakers.

If you are still hungry for more to read (and some ideas about how it impacts on teaching) this is an
article from ELTJ by Scott Thornbury. The article page with all his pieces is here.

Key for the questions listening