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Concept
Intonation (linguistics)
Summary
In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse. For example, the English question "Does Maria speak Spanish or French?" is interpreted as a yes-or-no question when it is uttered with a single rising intonation contour, but is interpreted as an alternative question when uttered with a rising contour on "Spanish" and a falling contour on "French". Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, its effects almost always work hand-in-hand with other prosodic features. Intonation is distinct from tone, the phenomenon where pitch is used to distinguish words (as in Mandarin) or to mark grammatical features (as in Kinyarwanda).
Most transcription conventions have been devised for describing one particular accent or language, and the specific conventions therefore need to be explained in the context of what is being described. However, for general purposes the International Phonetic Alphabet offers the two intonation marks shown in the box at the head of this article. Global rising and falling intonation are marked with a diagonal arrow rising left-to-right [↗︎] and falling left-to-right [↘︎], respectively. These may be written as part of a syllable, or separated with a space when they have a broader scope:
He found it on the street?
[ hiː ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↗︎ˈˈstɹiːt ‖ ]
Here the rising pitch on street indicates that the question hinges on that word, on where he found it, not whether he found it.
Yes, he found it on the street.
[↘︎ˈjɛs ‖ hi ˈfaʊnd ɪt | ɒn ðə ↘︎ˈstɹiːt ‖ ]
How did you ever escape?
[↗︎ˈˈhaʊ dɪdjuː | ˈɛvɚ | ə↘︎ˈˈskeɪp ‖ ]
Here, as is common with wh- questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question.
In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished:
Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time.
Official source
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