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Pitch and intonation. Kuiper and Allan Chapter 6.2. Pitch. People only rarely speak on a monotone. Pitch changes take two forms in languages: phonemic in tone languages intonational in all languages. Creating pitch. Pitch is created by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords.
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Pitch and intonation Kuiper and Allan Chapter 6.2
Pitch • People only rarely speak on a monotone. • Pitch changes take two forms in languages: • phonemic in tone languages • intonational in all languages
Creating pitch • Pitch is created by the rate of vibration of the vocal cords. • You can make your vocal cords vibrate at different rates when you sing. • You have a natural pitch span or pitch range when speaking.
Exercise Say the following first as a statement and second as a question. Listen carefully for the pitch of your voice at the end of the utterance. You left the train.
Intonation • is created by pitch movements. • Intonation is suprasegmental in that it is an overlay over the segmental phoneme sequence.
Tones • When the pitch of the voice changes during the production of a syllable we are hearing a tone. • Types of tones: • falling $ • rising € • rise fall fl • fall rise ‡
Exercise Listen to the following sentence and see if it divides into intonational sections. How many tones does each section have? After eating her breakfast, Joanna went out.
Tone groups • Speech is divided into tone groups. • Each tone group has one tonic syllable in which there is a tone.
An analogy • Think of speaking as rather like singing where each syllable has a note. • A tone group is a musical phrase. • The nuclear tone involves a pitch change on the syllable; all other syllables are sung without a change in pitch.
The musical notation of intonation • The normal pitch range • A tone group Are you at home
Where are tone group boundaries? • In continuous speech tone group boundaries tend to come at grammatical phrase boundaries. • The tonic syllable (the one having the pitch change) is usually the last stressed syllable in the tone group. • Tone group boundaries are marked by a vertical slash in a text.
The functions of intonation • attitudinal I’ll see you behind the bike sheds afterwards. You? • accentual • contrastive stress I want a big icecream. • grammatical Those who work slowly get to the top.