MELINA BELÉN GARCÍA VERÓN

MARINA SILVA

Reading guide:
• What three factors affect the pitch range exploited by speakers?
The three factors that affect the pitch range are idiosincratic, sociocultural and emotional. Idiosincratic has to do
with the nature of a speaker´s voice. That it to say women voices are usually higher than men. Sociocultural
because sometimes the pitch range is chosen by a whole group as in the case of Finnish speaking males who
have no intonation while Swedish speaking Finish males tend to use only the higher part of their vocal range.
Lastly, we talk about an emotional factor since to express excitement for instance, we extend our nonrmal range
and change our pitch.
• What is KEY?
According to Brazil Key is the relative pitch level, that is to say the variations in the pitch of the speaker´s voice.
The pitch of the speaker´s voice ranges or varies from high to low. In Wells words, the pitch range is the distance
between the top pitch and the baseline.
• How many key choices are there?
Speaker only exploit three pitch contrasts from an infinite number of pitch levels they could choose. Most authors
agree that there are three key choices, namely: low, mid and high key. These choices are according to Brazil
independently meaningful, selected for each tone unit, and made and recognized with reference to the
comparable pitch choice of the inmediately preceding tone unit, that is to say that mid key is not defined as the
norm so there are no absolute values for high, mid and low so the key is high only if it is higher that the preceding
one.
• What is the meaning of each key choice?
Mid key is the unmarked or neutral one. High key means that the tone unit is contrastive. High key enables
speakers to create their own idiosyncratic contrasting sets, independent of contrasts provided by the language or
the world. Thus, the high key presents the matter of the tone unit as if in the context of an existentially valid
opposition but such opposition may only be accesible to the hearer. Moreover, the high key combined with a
referring tone signals that the options are already common ground whereas with a proclaiming tone it would
indicate that the contrast between the options has not yet been established as this information is new to the
hearer. It is worth mentioning that the contrastivity conveyed by the use of high key is a social construct, a closed
class of items created by the participants intelligible to them at the time and place of utterance and sometimes
only there. On the other hand, low key is used to mark an equivalence relationship, so that the items of two
successive tone units are treated as synonyms or cause and consequence, in which one statement is implied by
the other so they are equivalent. There can also be equivalence across two utterances where the use of low key
at the beginning of the second one indicates that theres is a relationship between what the speaker says and
what the previous one has said and this is called restrictive which is a derivative of equative function.